ALL GOD'S DANGERS Life Of Nate Shaw Rosengarten Ned Cobb Black History Negro 1st

Description

VERY RARE FIRST EDITION COPY!!
Book Title
~
All God's Dangers
~ The Life Of Nate Shaw [Ned Cobb]
Author
~ Theodore Rosengarten
Publisher
~ Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
© Date
~ 1974, stated First Edition.
Cover
~ Brown cloth hardcover with gilt lettering on the spine. With Dustjacket.
Number of Pages
~ 574 pages with Index.
Illustrated
~ No.
Book measures about
~ 9 1/2 inches X 6 1/2 inches.
Condition
~
Good.
The
Dustjacket
has some very minor edgewear and a few very small edge tears. There is a small price sticker on the back. Otherwise the
Dustjacket
is in Good condition!
The
Book
has a few small faint spots (foxing) on the inside front cover, inside back cover, facing pages, and a couple of additional (mostly blank) pages. There is a short, thin black line on the front flyleaf. There are some very small faint spots on the outside edge of some pages that very slightly bleed onto the very edge of the margin of a low number of those pages (you really have to look for it). Otherwise this very
Rare First Edition Book
is in Good condition!
About the Book
~
Nate Shaw's "life story, brilliantly and unobtrusively edited from the 1500~page transcription of his spoken recollections, is both universal and particular. Nate Shaw's experience embodies the history ~ the everyday realities ~ of the deep South since Reconstruction. He is himself special, a storyteller in the great Southern tradition, with a passionate commitment to making us know how things really were. With its incomparable wealth and concreteness of human and social detail, his narrative will stand among the most compelling and revealing works of American autobiography."
"This book has a back story. Nate Shaw is a pseudonym. The sharecropper’s real name was Ned Cobb (1885~1973). Mr. Rosengarten changed the name for the safety of Mr. Cobb’s family ~ a grim commentary on race relations in Alabama in 1974.
In 1968 Mr. Rosengarten was a Harvard graduate student who went to Alabama with a friend who was researching a defunct organization called the Alabama Sharecroppers Union. Someone suggested they speak to Mr. Cobb, then 84.
Mr. Rosengarten relates what happened: “We asked him right off why he joined the union. He didn’t respond directly; rather, he ‘interpreted’ the question and began, ‘I was haulin’ a load of hay out of Apafalya one day ...’ and continued uninterrupted for eight hours. He recounted dealings with landlords, bankers, fertilizer agents, mule traders, gin operators, sheriffs and judges ~ stories of the social relations of the cotton system. By evening, the fire had risen and died and risen again, and our question was answered.”
No fool, Mr. Rosengarten returned many times, over several years, to speak with Mr. Cobb. He’d found a powerful American voice, one that cracked open a world never so fully explored in print. The result is
All God’s Dangers
, which deserves a place in the front rank of American autobiographies.
There are many reasons to attend to Ned Cobb’s story. It is dense and tangled social history, a narrative that essentially takes us from slavery to Selma from the point of view of an unprosperous but eloquent and unbroken black man. In some ways, the book is a reverse photographic image of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, the 1941 classic from James Agee and Walker Evans. Agee and Evans scrutinized the lives of white tenant farmers; in
All God’s Dangers
, we witness a black tenant family through three generations. The book is Faulknerian in its weave. Mr. Cobb’s working years, Mr. Rosengarten notes, “span approximately the same years as the Snopes family odyssey in William Faulkner’s trilogy.”
The book has its share of drama. We read about Cobb’s joining the radical union, about getting into a shootout with police while protecting a friend’s property from a fraudulent foreclosure, about his 12~year prison stint. But, in general, it moves gently; it’s more a stream than a river.
You will learn more about wheat, guano, farm implements, bugs, cattle killing and mule handling than you would think possible. Mr. Cobb loved and took good care of his working mules. About one, he declares: “She was just as pretty as a peeled onion.”
All God’s Dangers
also happens to be a dense catalog of the ways that whites tricked and mistreated blacks in the first half of the 20th century. “Years ago I heard that Abraham Lincoln freed the colored people,” Mr. Cobb says early on, “but it didn’t amount to a hill of beans.” About his white neighbors, he declares, “Any way they could deprive a Negro was a celebration to ‘em.”
The book’s title comes from these sentences: “All God’s dangers ain’t a white man. When the boll weevil starts in your cotton and go to depositin’ his eggs in them squares, that’s when he’ll kill you.”
Perhaps the best thing about
All God’s Dangers
is that it is so direct about the injustices piled upon Mr. Cobb’s family and other blacks in Alabama, while remaining so buoyant. Mr. Cobb had an unshakable sense of moral justice, but he did not want his heart to curdle with bitterness. “Good God, there wasn’t but few privileges that we was allowed,” he remarks. Yet he always had “big eyes and high hopes.” He becomes one of the first black farmers in Alabama to own a car.
Ned Cobb is full of advice about how to live. Some of this advice is funny. If you marry a sickly girl, he says, “you might just marry a doctor’s bill.” About farming and any kind of labor, you often get your best work done when you’re most tempted to nap. “Look out,” he advises, “for off times and rainy days.”
The real lessons in
All God’s Dangers
are the old, primal ones, lessons that Mr. Cobb manages to make fresh: Stand up for what you believe in; remain awake to experience; any job worth doing is worth doing well."
~New York Times Book Review
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
This Rare First Edition Book would be nice for any Historian, Black Americana Collector, or for anyone interested in History, Nate Shaw, or Ned Cobb !
It would be a nice Gift!
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
SHIPPING & PAYMENT INFORMATION
PLEASE USE THE SHIPPING CALCULATOR AT THE BOTTOM
or contact us for a quote
We will be happy to combine Shipping Charges for multiple purchases that can ship in the same package (for Domestic or International packages)
Domestic or International EXPRESS MAIL shipping IS available upon request
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
International Buyers
Please contact us for a shipping quote
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
International Buyers - Please Note
Import duties, taxes, and charges are not included in the item price or shipping charges. These charges are the buyer's responsibility.
Please check with your country's Customs Office to determine what these additional costs will be prior to bidding/buying.
Sometimes your country's Customs Office will delay delivery of your package. Please understand that we have NO control over any delays caused by your country's Customs Office.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I have many more interesting Books, Collectibles, Antiques, and other Stuff in my Ebay Store!
Use the Store Search Box above or this Link to My Store -
Dixie Cat's Books And Stuff
I AM ALWAYS HAPPY TO COMBINE SHIPPING COSTS FOR MULTIPLE PURCHASES - The more you buy, the more you save!!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
* * * * *
IF YOU ARE NOT RECEIVING EMAILS FROM US
* * * * *
We send emails out daily as you purchase items (usually within a few hours of being notified of the purchase). We also answer all email questions within 48 hours.
If you are not receiving our emails please adjust your spam settings and look in junk mail folders.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
d4d s4s