Word: rosengarten
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...THEODORE ROSENGARTEN 561 pages. Knopf...
...Rosengarten first went to see Nate Shaw because Shaw had been a member of a short-lived Alabama labor union, the Sharecroppers' Union, and had spent 12 years in prison after a shootout with white sheriffs that stemmed from his union activities. But the book turned out to be more than just a story about a man who had joined a union and gone to jail; it is a detailed account of 85 years of Nate Shaw's life, with the union and prison experiences serving as a central balancing point...
People are supposed to have wide-ranging and specific memories of their entire lives in the time just before they die--Nate Shaw died shortly after Rosengarten finished his tapings--but even given that, Shaw's ability to remember everything that happened to him is extraordinary. He tells, often supplying exact dates, about everything from how many bales of cotton he raised in his first year of tenant farming, to how he felt when his wife died, to the relative merits of the myriad mules he plowed behind...
...Rosengarten is operating on some tricky assumptions in his book: if Nate Shaw is a typical black Southerner, only with an unusual mind, then in telling his own story he is also telling the story of all other black Southerners as well. His smallest action, if seen as typical of an entire race and class, immediately becomes universal in its importance and profundity. If Nate Shaw buys a mule, say, it may make an interesting story in itself; but if it's actually all struggling black tenant farmers acting, with Nate as a distillation of all their experiences, whatever...
...critics have heaped an avalanche of unstinting praise on All God's Dangers, calling Nate Shaw "a black Homer." They seem to be saying, with great relief: See, black people can be as profound as white people, they just haven't had the chance to tell their story until Rosengarten tape-recorded Nate Shaw. But saying Nate Shaw's story is the story of all black people is assuming a degree of sameness among blacks that is just not there, and insulting. If Rosengarten had taperecorded the reminiscences of an 85-year-old white insurance salesman, no one would think...