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Time"A triumph of ideas and historical content as well of expression and style."—Randall Jarrell,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 .
