His Name Is George Floyd
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN NON-FICTION
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
You know how he died. This is how he lived.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction
Finalist for the National Book Award for Non-fiction
'An intimate, unvarnished and scrupulous account of his life...brilliantly revealing.' NEW YORK TIMES
Who was George Floyd? What did he hope for? And how did society set him up for struggle, in countless ways, before he was ever murdered?
In His Name is George Floyd we meet the kind young boy who talked his friends out of beating up a skinny kid from another neighbourhood and then befriended him on the walk home. Big Floyd the high school American football player who ignored his coach's pleas to be more aggressive and felt queasy at the sight of blood. The man who fell victim to an opioid epidemic we are only just beginning to understand. The sensitive son and loving father, constantly in search of a better life in a society determined to write him off based on things he had no control over: where he grew up, the size of his body and the colour of his skin.
Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with friends and family members, His Name Is George Floyd reveals the myriad ways that structural racism shaped Floyd's life and death - from his forebears' roots in slavery to an underfunded education, the overpolicing of his community and the devastating snare of the prison system. By offering us an intimate portrait of this one, emblematic life, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa deliver a powerful and moving exploration of how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington Post reporters Samuels and Olorunnipa deliver an impeccably researched biography of George Floyd, whose 2020 murder by Minneapolis police sparked nationwide protests. After recounting the events leading up to Floyd's death, the authors rewind to his early years in Houston's segregated Third Ward in the 1970s and '80s. Recruited to play football at Texas A&M–Kingsville, Floyd became the first in his family to attend a four-year college, but struggled to meet the academic requirements and eventually dropped out. Back in the Third Ward, he got sucked into the drug trade and spent more than a decade in and out of prison before moving to Minneapolis for a fresh start. Interwoven with the biographical details are incisive sketches of the political and historical events that have shaped life for Floyd's family and other Black Americans. Recounting how Floyd's great-great-grandfather was forced to sell his landholdings in early 1900s North Carolina, the authors note that "between 1910 and 1997, Black farmers lost control of more than 90 percent of their farmlands." Elsewhere, Samuels and Olorunnipa discuss the war on drugs, school segregation, redlining, and more. This multifaceted and exceptionally informative account is both a moving testament to Floyd and a devastating indictment of America's racial inequities.
