All Over But the Shoutin'

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Summary: Talented writer but...
Review: Bragg knows how to cast a spell with words. But the prose is too melodramatic. It intrudes upon the reader's own formation of impressions. For example, Bragg elucidates how his mother blames herself for the conditions in which her children had to grow up. Then he describes how well he turned out owing in large part to her. Then he says -- and here is the melodrama -- "I hope she blamed herself for that too." I don't know about you, but that sentence just makes me wince.

Rating:
Summary: All Over But The Shouting
Review: From the moment I picked up this book, it gripped my heart and would not let go. I only hope that my children have half the love and loyalty for me that Rick Bragg has for his Mother. She must be so very proud of him. He MUST write another book. One is not enough.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: I can't tell you how much I appreciate this book. Bragg has taken his life story and experiences and turned them into a testament useful to us all. I can think of nothing more valuable than writing about the experiences, struggles and triumphs of real, everyday folks. And Bragg has done just that. Bragg's honesty and willingness to write openly about his family is much appreciated. In the true spirit of a Southerner, Bragg takes his time to describe his experiences and feelings in a way that is witty and accurate. This book is a must for the individual seeking to find the real, contemporary South with which so many Southerners are familiar. As a Southerner, I feel that Mr. Bragg has accurately described my South--a South free of romantic verandas and mint juleps. The South you speak of is a place of struggle, conviction, defeat and triumph--all in the lives of everyday individuals. In the words of my mother, "you've hit the nail on the head," Mr. Bragg.

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Summary: I't ain't over yet
Review: This tribute to his mother delivers exactly that. However beautifully written and constructed the book is, it leaves me to wonder where other mentors were in his life. Surely, public school teachers must have noticed his talent - did a counselor, principal or elementary school teacher encourage him? I did like his recognition of his uncle's role in his life. So many boys, like Rick Bragg, have a male role model other than their father. The book is really a tribute to public education also, without which he may have had the talent but not the shaping, practice and training that enabled him to use his gift.

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Summary: A powerful memoir of growing up poor in the South
Review: All Over But The Shoutin' is Rick Bragg's gift to his mother. Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times, has written a powerful memoir of growing up poor in the South. At the center of his story is his mother, raising her three sons to manhood.

A deep understanding of the South is woven throughout the book, along with an appreciation of this region's poorest people. Rick Bragg was raised in a family led by his mother after she finally broke away from his alcoholic and violent father. Vivid memories crowd the book's pages as Bragg writes of his upbringing: surrounded by an extended family, food, hard work, and racism. There were several different cultures in the South of Bragg's youth. Whites belonged to classes, with corresponding differences in education and expectations. Bragg got only a few glimpses into the lives of the wealthy South. His upbringing was among the poorest of the poor. In his culture, men were expected to fight hard and dirty when insulted. Drinking and getting drunk was part of male gatherings. Salvation was found in religion, which surrounded people on the radio, in church, and when family got together. Women cooked huge meals that took hours to prepare. They were responsible for doing what needed to be done to hold a family together and raise the children.

What Bragg carries from his childhood are a fierce and protective love of the South, an affiliation with those who live in poverty wherever he finds them, and a hatred of those who grew up privileged and feel superior because of it. He also carries into adulthood a fear of fatherhood: a concern that he will become as his father was. This causes the breakup of his marriage and leaves Bragg in mid-life looking for something that he feels is missing. Finally, Bragg carries with him a sense of personal inferiority: that he is unworthy of his career, because of his lack of education. Many of these themes come together in the year that he spends as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is surprised at his selection for this program. He is angered by ignorance and "petrified opinions" about the South he finds there. Yet, he realizes during this year that "you can't go through life not liking people because they didn't have to work as hard or come as far as you did." Bragg seems to have come to terms with his past and present when he receives the Pulitzer Prize. This confirms his worth as a journalist and his mother's success in raising him.

It was at the funeral of his grandmother that Bragg realized the gradual and inexorable ending of the world he grew up in and determined to write this memoir to his mother, while she is still alive to read it. It is a powerful and haunting tribute to her dignity and hard work.

Rating:
Summary: A tribute to his mother
Review: Rick Bragg tells about his childhood and how it was for him, having an alcoholic for a father and being poor during that time. He really lets the reader know about what it was like to live where he did, in poverty. I notice that his mother played an important role in his life. I would've like to know more about her and her thoughts about their situation. As I continued to read this book, I was under the impression that this book was a tribute to his mother.

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Summary: This is an emotional book written by an excellent writer
Review: This beautiful and emotional story is about Rick Bragg, a poor child who later grew up to become a well-known writer. All Over but the Shouthin' is the story of Rick's father, a hard drinking and irresponsible man who many times abandoned his three children and his wife. A man whose desire for alcohol became more important than the love a father should have for his family. It is the story of Margaret Marie, the author's mother, a woman who never ate until her children were done first, and how she had to put away her pride when she had to sign for welfare. A woman with the addiction of giving everything she has even her own life to her children: Mark, Sam, and Rick. This is a story from a man who knew poverty and who posses the gift and the art to write unforgetable stories. Rick Bragg, a national correspondant for the New York Times, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996.

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Summary: The story is very heart warming.
Review: This story is very heart warming. It touches you emotionally. It is a story I think everyone should read

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Summary: Moving Story about Growing up in the South
Review: About the 5th memoir I have read. The author writes a moving portrait of his childhood & doesn't pull any punches when it comes to criticizing himself.

Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: So remarkably timeless for such a contemporary memior
Review: Just finishing Rick Bragg's book at 4:30 am this morning, my mind continues to return to flashes, intermittedly, of his mother's almost ethereal face to the gut-wrenching realities Ricky so easily guides, mesmerizes, conjoles and traps us so willing into. Whether they be the entrapments of his damaged psyche or the news stories he weaves through the gauze of that brilliant, albeit chipped, admitted loner soul of his; the words, the insight, is nothing short of inspirational. It made another Southerner like me, with a father more like his momma, coming from not so poor, but almost the same mind-set, cry, and more times than you could count on one hand. Not just from the remembrances of growing up more than a decade earlier in the South, but for the disturbingly wonderful crystalizations of the news events that have effected us all so deeply. (I read some of them first-hand in that great newspaper, The St.Pete Times.) And what a sense of humor, often so dark, but always there! I do think I laughed, and out-loud, more than I cried. That loner with such a chip (we all have them) on his shoulder made me believe maybe mine could even get a wee bit smaller. I've read the St. Pete Times 'most all my life, and never been much further than North Carolina, but he left me with regrets that I never, even for a short while, ventured so far as Califorinia's cold, dark, blue Pacific waters. If I did have another life to live, I would love to live it the way Rick Bragg is. Great book, a must for human bein's. May the young read it and catch a lesson or two in life, and then some.