His Name Is George Floyd
By Robert Samuels & Toluse Olorunnipa
- Genre
- History, Society & Current Affairs
- Publisher
- Viking (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9780593490617
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice is a biography by the journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, published by Viking in May 2022. It recounts George Floyd's life and examines systemic racism. It won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
The world knows how George Floyd died; this book restores how he lived. Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa reconstruct Floyd's forty-six years - a childhood in Houston's Third Ward, a talented athlete's thwarted ambitions, addiction, fatherhood, the move to Minneapolis - and set that life against the systems that shaped and constrained it. It is at once an intimate biography and a study of structural racism in housing, education, health care and policing, the forces that pressed on one man from birth. intendle recommends it as a model of humane, rigorous journalism that refuses to reduce a person to a symbol. Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and a National Book Award finalist, it turns a name from a hashtag back into a human being. Sobering and essential, it insists that understanding a death requires understanding a whole life.