Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story by Timothy B. Tyson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
Book Review: The Gospel According to Timohy Tyson!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
For any one interested in the question of race in America, "Blood Done Signed My Name" should be required reading. So often, the historical and sociological discussions of the race problem in America are sanitized and politically correct. Tyson's discussion is a no-holds-barred discussion, immensly readable, told from the perspective of a white man who lived in an "enlightened" North Carolina town and observed, first hand, the evolution of the town during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. In telling his story, he illuminates the operant attitudes, the unspeakable cruelty, and the economic exploitation, which underlie the institution of segregation, and their tragic consequence in the lives of black and white Americans. As a black, native North Crolinian, who lived through that and earlier periods, I bear personal witness to the accuracy of his portrayals. After reading his book, I could only say, "Thank God for one honest white man in America." If you can stand the truth.....read it!!!
Dr. Eugene Thamon Simpson
Sicklerville, NJ 08081
Book Review: Wow!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is wonderfully written and fantastic as a history of a small town in North Carolina, the Civil Rights movement, and American attitudes about race. It is written with sensitivity to both sides who were engaged: one in a struggle for equality, the other in a struggle to maintain what they considered their heritage. It does not demonize anyone, but grapples with the history of where we have been and consequently where we are going.
Even if you've never cared about race, equality and Civil Rights, you will find this book well worth your time in its exploration of the complex web of relationships that make up and sometimes pull apart an American community.
Book Review: Setting Our Memories Straight
Summary: 5 Stars
When author and historian Tim Tyson learned in 1970 at the age of 10 that his friend's father and older brothers had just "shot 'em a nigger," I was just about to turn 18 and was getting ready to graduate from high school in Evanston, Illinois. During my reading of this profound book, I kept reverting back to that time, asking myself, was I aware that blacks were still being murdered due to white fears and white racism? Though I went to an integrated high school and had one close relationship with a black friend, I think I, like many other whites, believed that straight out lynchings of blacks by murderous whites were from a pre-civil rights era. However, as the "Blood Done Sign My Name" shows us, such white beliefs were naive and ill informed.
Tyson's book is important for helping us set our memories of the past straight, and for its insistence that we understand that white supremacy is like a stubborn root, one that keeps reasserting itself again and again. This knowledge is crucial as we look at the racial landscape today because it can help us refrain from making a similar mistake all over again. Although present day polls repeatedly show that most whites think racism is over, Tyson's book may be a catalyst for whites to rethink that oft repeated perspective. This book written with such soul and heart is an important book for any person who wants to understand why issues of race are unlikely to recede anytime soon. Even though I am a fairly informed person about past and present white supremacy and racism, Tyson's book taught me more. By revisiting a tragic memory from one of his boyhood towns, Tyson keeps alive in our national consciousness the recognition that white racism and its legacy did not end in America's distant or recent past. Denise Rose, Oak Park, IL.
Book Review: The Strength of What's Left Unsaid
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is written with an economy of style and provides an important exploration of the human condition. You will carry many of the episodes in the book around with you long after you've read it. This book carries such a potent message that it should be compulsive reading for all.
The author's strength is what he leaves unsaid. In recounting events without invasive opinions, he offers a candid, sometimes brutal and relatively balanced book on what kind of life a black really lived in a place where racial hatred ran so deep. The results are incredible, heart-wrenching, and deeply disturbing. It inspires self-questioning. It made me wonder: if one can only learn of oneself by how he reacts to others and others react to him, then surely as other's perceptions of him change in reponse to a superficial outward characteristic such as skin color, his inward sense or perception of self must also change, thus altering the essence of his soul and the nature of his self knowledge.
This profound book offers insight that is not lessened by time. It poses questions about society, social groupings and appearances, and ultimately, how the fragile soul can be damaged or altered as a result of the reactions to the body it occupies. After all, does one's soul have a color?
Book Review: fiction reported as non fiction
Summary: 2 Stars
As opposed to Tim Tyson, I have lived in Oxford most of my life and therefore truely know of the people, events, locations he supposedly researched extensively to write this book. This is a fictionalized account of an event. A black man was killed by a white man, but Tim Tyson doesn't know the truth as to what led up to it, nor the subsequent events. . I find it interested that the whites are depicted as "terrorists" and the blacks as "military operators". As I know that many so called "facts" are not so, (names, events, locations, etc.) I have to suspect the remainder of the book. The sad result is to question all books written by him and ALL graduates of the Duke PHD program. Tyson should advertise his future writings as fiction as he would make a good writer of the southern genre.