All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw [Paperback]

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.“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?” —The 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

“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’sAll the President’s Men. So didWorking, by Studs Terkel, and Robert M. Pirsig’sZen 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—wasAll God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, an oral history of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper. . . . It is superb—l£§