All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw

by Theodore Rosengarten

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525562856
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/31/2018
Pages:	560
Sales rank:	135,840
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Theodore Rosengarten is an independent historian whose work focuses on the lives of slaves and freedmen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter and editor of A Portion of People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life. Rosengarten teaches in the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of History at the College of Charleston. He has served as a senior research associate in documentary studies at Duke University and has taught previously at Harvard University and the University of South Carolina. He lives with his wife, Dale, and two sons in South Carolina.

Table of Contents

Preface
Youth
Deeds
Prison
Revelation
Appendix
Index

What People are Saying About This

John Hope Franklin

The ascendancy of [Booker T. Washington] is one of the most dramatic and significant episodes in the history of American education and of race relations.

Editorial Reviews

"There are only a few American autobiographies of surpassing greatness....Now there is another one, Nate Shaw's." — The New York Times

"Extraordinarily rich and compelling...possesses the same luminous power we associate with Faulkner...the same marvelous idiom, the same wry, sardonic humor...[it] will stun the listener-reader, hold him in its grip, and never really quite let go of him? — Washington Post

"Eloquent and revelatory. When, finally, this big book is put down, one feels exhilarated. This is an anthem to human endurance." — Studs Terkel, New Republic

From the Publisher

There are only a few American autobiographies of surpassing greatness…Now there is another one, Nate Shaw's.

The New York Times

....Shaw's rich language and high storytelling style make this an eloquent book. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

Charles McGrath

“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. I pounced on it after I discovered that Richard Howorth, the well-read owner of Square Books, the independent bookstore in Oxford, Miss., utters its title aloud every time a customer asks the question, 'What one book would you say best explains the South?' I wish I could say that, this early spring, I read All God’s Dangers in one sitting. It’s not that kind of book. It’s a meandering thing; its pleasures are intense but cumulative. This book rolls. But it is superb—both serious history and a serious pleasure, a story that reads as if Huddie Ledbetter spoke it while W. E. B. Du Bois took dictation. That it’s been largely forgotten is bad for it, but worse for us. . . . All God’s Dangers  . . . deserves a place in the front rank of American autobiographies. There are many reasons, in 2014, to attend to Ned Cobb’s [Nate Shaw’s] story.

New York Times - Dwight Garner

“There are only a few American autobiographies of surpassing greatness. . . . Now there is another one, Nate Shaw’s.

New York Times

“Extraordinarily rich and compelling . . . possesses the same luminous power we associate with Faulkner.

Washington Post Book World - Robert Coles

“Eloquent and revelatory. . . . This is an anthem to human endurance.

New Republic - Studs Terkel

“The authentic voice of a warm, brave, and decent individual. . . . A pleasure to read. . . . Shaw’s observations on the life and people around him, clothed in wonderfully expressive language, are fresh and clear.

Christian Science Monitor - H.W. Bragdon

“Astonishing . . . Nate Shaw was a formidable bearer of memories. . . . Miraculously, this man’s wrenching tale sings of life’s pleasures: honest work, the rhythm of the seasons, the love of relatives and friends, the stubborn persistence of hope when it should have vanished . . . All God’s Dangers is most valuable for its picture of pure courage.

Time - Paul Grey

“A triumph of ideas and historical content as well of expression and style.

Harvard Educational Review - Randall Jarrell

“Tremendous . . . a testimony of human nobility . . . the record of a heroic man with a phenomenal memory and a life experience of a kind of seldom set down in print. . . . a person of extraordinary stature, industrious, brave, prudent, and magnanimous. . . . One emerges from these hundred of pages wiser, sadder, and better because of them. A unique triumph!

Chicago Tribune Book World - Alfred C. Ames

“Awesome and powerful . . . A living history of nearly a century of cataclysmic change in the life of the Southerner, both black and white . . . Nate Shaw spans our history from slavery to Selma, and he can evoke each age with an accuracy and poignancy so pure that we stand amazed.

Baltimore Sun