This memoir by historian Timothy Tyson, a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, was the 2006 selection for the University of Wisconsin Common Book program, won the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award–and will be featured right here on this web site in August-September, 2008.
Please feel free to contribute to the discussion online, to gather your own group of readers to meet and talk with, and to contact me (circlereader at readingcirclebooks dot com) if you would like to participate in a face-to-face Reading Circle in the Madison, Wisconsin, area.
Posts in this series so far:
History and Humanity Carefully Considered
- Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
- Timothy B. Tyson
- Three Rivers Press 2005-05-03
- Average Amazon Review:
Worth reading- Through the Eyes of Many
- Grippingly Written, Moving, and Historically Powerful
- Evangelical Pastor - 63 years old
“Daddy and Roger and ‘em shot ‘em a nigger.” That’s what Gerald Teel said to me in my family’s driveway in Oxford, North Carolina, on May 12th, 1970. We were both ten years old.
Blood Done Sign My Name is a wonderful example of scholarship used well for the common good. In writing this personal and compelling story of a murder and its aftermath, Tyson uses the full set of tools available to professional historians–including interviews with those who were there, court records, newspaper accounts, audio & video recordings, personal diaries–and he makes all this information publicly known in his “Notes on Sources” for each chapter. At the same time, he shows his preacher’s-kid heritage by wrapping all this scholarship in an engaging and compelling narrative that, for all it’s compassion and gentle friendliness, lets no one off the hook.
You can read an excerpt of the book on the publisher’s site, and visit NPR to hear an interview with the author. (Hearing Professor Tyson’s voice makes reading his words that much more enjoyable!)
This book is a call to be conscious of the kind of history of which many people are unaware, and to do justice to the discomfort that awareness might bring. When it comes to race relations in America, says Tyson, “If there is to be reconciliation, there must be truth. And if it makes you a little uncomfortable…lean into it.
My rating:
hReview by CircleReader , 2008/07/26
