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

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(More customer reviews)This is a timeless classic, and not just among memoirs, because the subject was a great American---a man who "had no get-back in him." Nate Shaw (real name Ned Cobb) had an amazing memory, and also an acute understanding of the post-Civil War rural South. The rhythm of the seasons, work routines, knowledge of livestock, nature and people too, combine for a profound view of a vanished America. (If you want to really know about mules, Ned's the man.) But Ned didn't just observe, he worked with the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union and defended powerless friends, serving 12 years in prison for his pains. This activism sets him apart from Kas Maine, a South African sharecropper to whom he's been compared in recent years. The earthy dialect wears out some readers, but otherwise "All God's Dangers" is compelling from start to end. Writers from Wendell Berry to Pete Daniel praise both man and book, while John Beecher's "In Egypt Land" is a moving poetic rendition of Ned's story. R. Kelley, "Hammer & Hoe" vividly recreates 1930s Alabama; on Kas Maine, see C. Van Onselen, "The Seed Is Mine." But Ned tells about his world far better than the others. In living, then narrating, a life of great struggle lived with great dignity, Ned Cobb performed a signal service---for all of us. We are in your debt!

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All God's Dangers won the National Book Award in 1975."There are only a few American autobiographies of surpassing greatness. . . . Now there is another one, Nate Shaw's."—New York Times"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"Extraordinarily rich and compelling . . . possesses the same luminous power we associate with Faulkner." —Robert Coles,Washington Post Book World"Eloquent and revelatory. . . . This is an anthem to human endurance." —Studs Terkel, New Republic"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."—H.W. Bragdon, Christian Science Monitor"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."—Paul Grey, Time"A triumph of ideas and historical content as well of expression and style."—Randall Jarrell, Harvard Educational Review"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!"—Alfred C. Ames, Chicago Tribune Book World"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

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