Life Is So Good is a good book to learn about history from a non-official perspective. This account of one man's life through Twentieth Century America is strikingly different from what you find in civic texts. The newspapers in Dawson's youth didn't report on anything that he remembered as being important, and he had never heard of the events that were in the old newspapers that Glaubman unearthed for him. The world he was born into offered no opportunities for him and no expectation for change. When he was ten, he witnessed the lynching of a friend, just a few years older than he was. When he went to work as a hired hand on a white family's farm, he slept in a shed. He experienced the worst of American racism. But while he was entitled to be angry and bitter, he never was. As his granddaughter Charisse said at the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti Reads program in January, he taught his children and grandchildren to avoid things that would hurt them. He never dwelt on the past. In fact, his grandchildren had never heard the story of the lynching before they read it in the draft of the book!
When Dawson learned to read, he wanted to read about the history of working people's lives. He was disappointed to find that it just had not been written. So with Richard Glaubman's help, he agreed to tell his life story. Dawson was an inspiration to so many. Like other older people, he was "living history." One of the other adults in his literacy class put it: "With Mr. Dawson here, history goes way back. History is real."
Life Is So Good is a good book about an extraordinary man. We recommend it as good history and as an inspiration.