All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw

Nate Shaw, Theodore Rosengarten

University of Chicago Press, 2000 - Biography & Autobiography - 575 pages

All God's Dangers won the National Book Award in 1975. "On a cold January morning in 1969, 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

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Review: All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw

User Review  - vera - Goodreads

read this book. slowly. then start reading it again. It is one of my all time favorites and is really good read aloud on a roadtrip.

Contents

• Preface: xiii
• YOUTH: 1
• DEEDS: 95
• PRISON: 345
• REVELATION: 413
• Appendix: 559
• Index: 563

About the author

All God's Dangers won the National Book Award in 1975. "On a cold January morning in 1969, 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

Bibliographic information

• Title: All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw; A Borzoi book
• Authors: Nate Shaw, Theodore Rosengarten
• Editor: Theodore Rosengarten
• Compiled by: Theodore Rosengarten
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2000
• ISBN: 0226727742, 9780226727745
• Length: 575 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / General; Cooking / Beverages / Alcoholic / General; Cooking / Reference; History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies); Social Science / Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies; Social Science / General