All God’s Children recommended on The Millions
Geoff Dyer, author of over a dozen books including the recent and noteworthy essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, recommends Fox Butterfield’s All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence in his Year in Reading piece for esteemed online rag The Millions. In Butterfield’s 1995 title, the story of Willie Bosket, who was imprisoned in 1978 for committing double murder at the age of fifteen, is woven into the history of violence and racism in America, dating back to the Civil War and the slaveholding South. Dyer remarks, “The narrative of this investigative genealogy is valuable in itself…but it’s the close-up story of Willie and his father that makes the book so compelling: the constant, cliffhanging hope of the possibility of redemption matched by the attendant fear of something ever more dreadful about to be unleashed.” All God’s Children was reissued by Vintage in 2008, and is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and your local indie bookseller.
