Life Is So Good
by George Dawson, Richard Glaubman

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Book Reviews of Life Is So Good

Book Review: Centenarian "Brother" Remembers a Century
Summary: 5 Stars

"Sweet Sadie" and "Queen Bess," as they called one other, have since passed on. But picking up the torch is 101-year-old George Dawson, the principal author of "Life Is So Good," co-written with Richard Glaubman. The book was done as an oral history, and deals primarily with life in the South.

The volume is an excellent read -- instructive, insightful, emotionally moving and inspiring. And while it covers nearly the same historical period as the Delany sisters' work, it examines the time from very different perspectives. The Delanys were light-skinned, professional women with college degrees, who spent most of their careers in New York City. Dawson, on the hand, was not only uneducated, but illiterate, and never rose above blue-collar work. In addition, he was dark of complexion, which undoubtedly raised the bar for him.

"Life Is So Good" is a page-turner, rushing forward like a well-written novel, and breathing with authenticity. The editor preserves Dawson's voice whenever possible, purposely not correcting the unschooled grammar. Because Dawson was not influenced by newspapers, books, or historical events as they happened, his story is his alone, and acts as a mirror to the times in which he lived. The book has a timeless quality that will make it good reading a century from now. It brings to mind two classics -- Alex Haley's "Roots" and Ralph Ellison's autobiographical novel, "The Invisible Man." Except for a structural flaw -- the unnecessary insertion of Glaubman himself into the body of the story, which disrupts the narrative flow -- this book could become a classic in its own right.

Glaubman, an elementary school teacher in Washington state, was so moved by reading about Dawson in the newspaper that he traveled all the way to Dallas to meet him. Then, realizing the literary potential of Dawson's life story, he persuaded the older man to let him move into his house, so that he could record his story on tape. Glaubman deserves a great deal of credit for making the book possible, and editing it so well. But he would have done better to tell about his involvement in the project only in the introduction, and leave the rest of the book for Dawson. Perhaps he will consider doing this in a second edition.

The book resembles "Roots" in its breathtaking detail about everyday life dating back to slavery. For this, Dawson relies on his own memory. He recalls the stories he heard directly from his grandmother, who was a slave during her childhood, and his great-grandmother, born in 1812, who was still alive during Dawson's early years. His account of their stories, like many parts of the book, is riveting.

Like the main character in "Invisible Man," Dawson recounts his experiences in traveling from place to place, working at a great variety of jobs, while trying to maintain dignity in the face of overt racism. Many parts of "Life Is So Good" are as vivid as Ellison's great novel.

But unlike Ellison's character, who was educated, Dawson had the burden of hiding his illiteracy from his employers, and even from his own children. It numbs the mind to think that "Invisible Man" was published 48 years ago, yet Dawson was actually born 16 years before Ellison. Such is the miracle of extreme old age.

When I first read in an article that Dawson had learned to read at the age of 98, I didn't believe it. By the time I got to the end of his book, I believed it.

Unfortunately, the book suffers from a common fault of autobiographies: it initially describes every event in microscopic detail, then gradually loses steam, so that the story peters out, and virtually ends by the 1950s. One is left wondering how many memorable incidents from the past 40 or 50 years could be included, if the author and his assistant had unlimited time and resources available.

But this is only a minor fault. What did get into print was probably the most valuable part of the story -- an eyewitness account of an age that has been largely excluded from the history books, and exists only in the memories of a handful of African-American centenarians.

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Max Millard is working on an oral history project about the West Coast's senior black journalist, 92-year-old Thomas Fleming, co-founder in 1944 of the Sun-Reporter, San Francisco's oldest weekly black newspaper.

Summary of Life Is So Good

African-American & Black Books

• Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > African-American & Black
• Historical > United States
• Regional U.S. > South
• History > Americas > United States