All God's Dangers
The Life of Nate Shaw

This book is absolutely incredible and everyone, especially Americans, should read it. No offense, but the reader who makes the comment that the book, told in Nate Shaw's voice, was confusing because of the colloquialisms should, in my humble opinion, be ignored. I admit, it was a bit jarring at fir......more

This review contains spoilers. This review is quite long. Here is a tl;dr: Ned Cobb (1885-1973), also known as Nate Shaw, was a black farmer in Alabama. Ned succeeded in life despite mistreatment and the horrible racism of the American South during the Jim Crow years. He fought constantly against the......more

Only in America can racism and anti-racism, labor rights and pornography all be thrown into the same bag, but that is the case here. In 1969 a young graduate student, Theodore Rosengarten, stumbled upon"Nate Shaw", the pseudonym of a Black sharecropper in Alabama active in trade union work during th......more

Theodore Rosengarten stumbled upon Nate Shaw, by chance, when Nate Shaw was 85 years old and living in his home and only state of Alabama. Although Nate, his real name being Ned Cobb, could not read or write, his memory for his eight and a half decades on this earth was impeccable. Mr. Rosengarten s......more

This is a remarkable book. Rosengarten has allowed Nate Shaw to tell his life story in his own words and in his own way. Some people will undoubtedly get impatient with Nate's way of telling his story. "Do I really need to know that much about mules." I read the book in short stretches, often stoppi......more