All Over But the Shoutin'

All Over But the Shoutin'
by Rick Bragg [B B2785]

Rick Bragg wrote All Over But the Shoutin' for his mother, a woman abandoned by an alcoholic husband and left to raise three sons in the hardscrabble country of northeastern Alabama. His tribute to his mother is touching, but never too sweet: the pathos of poverty and hopelessness tempered with humor and everyday acts of kindness. Bragg's birth at a drive-in movie theater seemed to portend his eventual career as a journalist, on assignment and packed suitcase at the ready. "I am told it was a hot, damp night in late July 1959, one of those nights when the setting of the sun brings no relief. It might have been the heat, or something that she ate - an orange slush and a Giant Dill Pickle - but about the time Charlton Heston laid eyes on that golden calf and disowned the Children of Israel as idol worshippers and heathen sons of lewd women, I elected to emerge. Some births are marked by a notation in the family Bible, others are acknowledged with the hoisting of glasses. For me it all began with wandering Hebrews, flying gravel and a dangling speaker." He writes of his childhood in the backwoods of Alabama, the feel of the rich, red clay soil, the whisper of the wind through the pines in the evening and the smell of the sweat on people trying to eke out a living there. "The only thing poverty does is grind down your never endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through and the dream accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be. While my mother will stare you dead in the eye and say she never thought of herself as poor, do not believe for one second that she did not see the rest of the world, the better world, spinning around her, out of reach." Read this book because you like to read memoirs, read this book because you like characters who are hardworking and down-to-earth, or read this book because you long to read a beautifully written and fitting tribute to all the ordinary people, those people so important in each of our lives. -- recommended by Evelyn D. - Bennett Martin Public Library

[ Wikipedia page for Rick Bragg ] | [ publisher's official Rick Bragg web page ]

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