All over but the Shoutin'

All over but the Shoutin' Review

This is the first book of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg's autobiographical trilogy (which includes Ava's Man and The Prince of Frogtown) about his family and growing up in the mill towns of northeast Alabama. Bragg also wrote I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, the authorized biography of American POW Jessica Lynch in 2003.
Each of these books has the ability grab you on the very first page and draw you into his world. His life experiences of having a distant father (as the result of his father's Korean War post-tramatic stress syndrome) is uncannily similar to that of late Atlanta author Lewis Grizzard, whose father (and family) also suffered from PTSD. I am certain this also informed his approach to and understanding of Jessica Lynch.
Rick Bragg's latest book, The Most They Ever Had, is series of essays about the people of the mill towns. It was published by MacAdam/Cage in October of 2009.

All over but the Shoutin' Feature

• ISBN13: 9780679774020
• Condition: New
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All over but the Shoutin' Overview

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most.

But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives--and the country that shaped and nourished them--with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable.

All over but the Shoutin' Specifications

One reason Rick Bragg won a Pulitzer Prize for his feature articles at the New York Times is that he never forgets his roots. When he writes about death and violence in urban slums, Bragg draws on firsthand knowledge of how poverty deforms lives and on his personal belief in the dignity of poor people. His memoir of a hardscrabble Southern youth pays moving tribute to his indomitable mother and struggles to forgive his drunken father. All Over but the Shoutin' is beautifully achieved on both these counts--and many more.

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