"There are only a few American autobiographies of surpassing greatness. . . . Now there is another one, The Life of Nate Shaw by Theodore Rosengarten—
'All God's Dangers'{Review}, winning the National Book Award in 1975.
Nineteen seventy-four was a good year for nonfiction writing in America. Robert A. Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” came out. So did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men.” So did “Working,” by Studs Terkel, and Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
Each was a finalist for the National Book Award. Yet the winner in general nonfiction — the category was then called contemporary affairs — was “All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw,” an oral history of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper. Its author, the man who compiled it from extensive interviews, was a writer named Theodore Rosengarten.
Somewhere along the line, people stopped talking about it. —
"Friends of mine who talk about nothing except Southern literature have barely heard of the book." Read Full Article by DWIGHT GARNER
All God's Dangers
Part Two Of Two Parts"I've had my eyes open and my ears. What I've seen I've seen, and what I've heard I've heard. God knows I won't jump back from tellin' what I know."Meet Nate Shaw, a cotton farmer, born in Alabama in 1885. Although his parents were slaves, Shaw felt free. He felt equal to anyone, and listening to his amazing life, there is no doubt of his intelligence and originality. Imagine his frustrations, wrapped in a black skin in conservative rural Alabama. For a gifted black.
Nate Shaw's father was born under slavery. Nate Shaw was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton for thirty-five cents an hour. At the age of forty-seven, he faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor's crop.
His defiance cost him twelve years in prison. This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw's oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of an "over-average" man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people -- and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about.
Taken from a PBS segment, "Jim Crow Stories."
This book has a back story. Nate Shaw is a pseudonym. The sharecropper’s real name was Ned Cobb (1885-1973). Mr. Rosengarten changed the name for the safety of Mr. Cobb’s family—
a grim commentary on race relations in Alabama in 1974.
What one book would you say best explains the South?:
"On a cold January morning in 1968, a young white graduate student from Massachusetts, stumbling along the dim trail of a long-defunct radical organization of the 1930s, the Alabama Sharecropper Union, heard that there was a survivor and went looking for him. In a rural settlement 20 miles or so from Tuskegee in east-central Alabama he found him—the man he calls Nate Shaw—a black man, 84 years old, in full possession of every moment of his life and every facet of its meaning. . . .
Theodore Rosengarten, the student, had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey and able to tell it with awesome intellectual power, with passion, with the almost frightening power of memory in a man who could neither read nor write but who sensed that the substance of his own life, and a million other black lives like his, were the very fiber of the nation's history." —H. Jack Geiger, New York Times Book Review
The book’s title comes from these sentences: “All God’s dangers ain’t a white man. Mr. Cobb had an unshakable sense of moral justice, but he did not want his heart to curdle with bitterness.
The real lessons in “All God’s Dangers”: Stand up for what you believe in; remain awake to experience; any job worth doing is worth doing well.—
Full Article written by DWIGHT GARNER via NY TIMES
“Some folks don’t use the time God gives ‘em; that’s why they’re liable to come up defeated.”
Read Books by Theodore Rosengarten.
The REVIEW Accommodates Many Voices:
Compelling Reads from Emerging Authors. Thanks for Reading!
'All God's Dangers'{Review}, winning the National Book Award in 1975.
Nineteen seventy-four was a good year for nonfiction writing in America. Robert A. Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” came out. So did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men.” So did “Working,” by Studs Terkel, and Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
Each was a finalist for the National Book Award. Yet the winner in general nonfiction — the category was then called contemporary affairs — was “All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw,” an oral history of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper. Its author, the man who compiled it from extensive interviews, was a writer named Theodore Rosengarten.
Somewhere along the line, people stopped talking about it. —
"Friends of mine who talk about nothing except Southern literature have barely heard of the book." Read Full Article by DWIGHT GARNER
All God's Dangers
Part Two Of Two Parts"I've had my eyes open and my ears. What I've seen I've seen, and what I've heard I've heard. God knows I won't jump back from tellin' what I know."Meet Nate Shaw, a cotton farmer, born in Alabama in 1885. Although his parents were slaves, Shaw felt free. He felt equal to anyone, and listening to his amazing life, there is no doubt of his intelligence and originality. Imagine his frustrations, wrapped in a black skin in conservative rural Alabama. For a gifted black.
Nate Shaw's father was born under slavery. Nate Shaw was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton for thirty-five cents an hour. At the age of forty-seven, he faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor's crop.
His defiance cost him twelve years in prison. This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw's oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of an "over-average" man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people -- and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about.
Taken from a PBS segment, "Jim Crow Stories."
This book has a back story. Nate Shaw is a pseudonym. The sharecropper’s real name was Ned Cobb (1885-1973). Mr. Rosengarten changed the name for the safety of Mr. Cobb’s family—
a grim commentary on race relations in Alabama in 1974.
What one book would you say best explains the South?:
"On a cold January morning in 1968, a young white graduate student from Massachusetts, stumbling along the dim trail of a long-defunct radical organization of the 1930s, the Alabama Sharecropper Union, heard that there was a survivor and went looking for him. In a rural settlement 20 miles or so from Tuskegee in east-central Alabama he found him—the man he calls Nate Shaw—a black man, 84 years old, in full possession of every moment of his life and every facet of its meaning. . . .
Theodore Rosengarten, the student, had found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey and able to tell it with awesome intellectual power, with passion, with the almost frightening power of memory in a man who could neither read nor write but who sensed that the substance of his own life, and a million other black lives like his, were the very fiber of the nation's history." —H. Jack Geiger, New York Times Book Review
The book’s title comes from these sentences: “All God’s dangers ain’t a white man. Mr. Cobb had an unshakable sense of moral justice, but he did not want his heart to curdle with bitterness.
The real lessons in “All God’s Dangers”: Stand up for what you believe in; remain awake to experience; any job worth doing is worth doing well.—
Full Article written by DWIGHT GARNER via NY TIMES
“Some folks don’t use the time God gives ‘em; that’s why they’re liable to come up defeated.”
Read Books by Theodore Rosengarten.
The REVIEW Accommodates Many Voices:
Compelling Reads from Emerging Authors. Thanks for Reading!
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