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All Over But the Shoutin'

All Over But the Shoutin'

List Price: $18.00
Your Price: $12.24
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: depressing
Review: Now I know the feeling an ox gets after a long day at work. I was never allowed a chance to smile throughout this slogging, pitiful stench of Southern madness. Doing cop reports at a Myrtle Beach newspaper, the characters ring true, and I remember seeing a large block of ice in a tea-filled tank once at a BBQ in 1961. I loved the voice, the Southern pitch, but after the trudge, it was back to the low intellectual prison of Southern writing when the shouting was over. My wife cussed me out after she checked our account and saw I had wasted our electric bill money on this book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This is a uniquely Southern story
Review: I read this book flying home the day after we buried my father, who was the antithesis of Bragg's father. But, the story I read there was a story I knew intimately, from the stories especially that my mother told. Both my parents are Southerners, and I was raised in the South. My dad's death may have been hastened by the fact that I dared move to that Northern city of sin, a.k.a. New York. He was a successful man, a respected man, a well-loved man, by both his friends and family, but he never lost that "aw shucks" country boy way that defines rural Southern men. Bragg's story captures the good and the bad of the South...it is real, it is true. I cried at many parts, and I laughed at many others (the funniest had to have been when his mother went with him to NY to be there when he received his Pulitzer Prize). Of her generation, and that of my parents (they were the exception to the rule, both having more degrees than you could shake a stick at), especially in the more rural areas, a lack of formal education abounded. But never never make the mistake of believing, as Bragg reiterates, that being uneducated meant being dumb, or being ignorant. The truth is a lot of them have a lot more common sense than those of us with fancy degrees. Bragg's book is a must-read for anyone who wants to see the South in all its glory and reality.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Southern writing at it's best!
Review: Bragg's gives the reader so much with the glimpse into his life and the woman who shaped him. The book is a tribute to his mother, a woman who moves through proverty and heartache with grace and honor. Braggs captures the Southern class structure and shames those of us who may have participated in unkind thoughts and deeds. He also captures the lighter side of the South through football, church meetings, and family.

I was extremely moved by the stories behind the stories of his career as a reporter. Often, I was moved to tears.

But-- I can't end this without paying my own tribute to his brother, Sam. This man is hero material through and through -- and in many ways reminds me of Bragg's mother. Yes, I fell in love with Sam. I might have to drive over to 'Bama and let my car break down ;>

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Alabama Angela's Ashes
Review: I couldn't help but notice the tremendous similarities between this book and Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize winner, Angela's Ashes. The young boy with brothers, a drunken father, the poverty, the shame, and his search to find a way out of it all could almost have been a memoir of the McCourts, southern style.

Bragg's writing is certainly enviable and worthy of acclaim, but I would have liked him better as a person if he hadn't felt the need to "brag" about his accomplishments.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It took my heart,soul, tears ,laughter and me back to Al
Review: A wonderful tribute to a strong and loving mother. A story of determination and hard work, along with God given talent(Rick Bragg calls it luck)of a poor person who wants the respect and opportunities that all people deserve. He's successful! He overcomes but doesn't forget where he comes from. It's a self help book for those of us who came from the same place.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Appealing but seriously flawed memoir
Review: To criticize Rick Bragg's often tender memoir may be a bit like criticizing Santa Claus, but in this case someone has to do it. I expected to like "All Over But the Shoutin': I like the South, Southern writers, books about the South, and even grits. On his NPR interview with Terry Gross he came across as a deeply compassionate man. But in his memoir he creates a circle of righteousness so circumscribed that only the most self-flagellating of liberals could fail to feel under attack. Bragg is driven by anger at how he and his family were victimized by stereotypes about "white trash," but he throws stereotypes - e.g., "yuppie" - around on a wholesale level, often to a ludicrous degree. In the same passage where he bristles at the memory of condescending treatment from a schoolteacher, he speculates about her car, "probably a Cadillac." He want to have it both ways, to flaunt his "white trash" credentials and to claim the moral status of victim. He boasts of his father's success in fights while deploring his father's cruel abandonments of his mother. He wants to belittle Harvard-types and flaunt his Nieman fellowship at the same time. What Bragg needed here was to listen to himself; short, of that, he needed an editor who would not let him get away with this kind of disingenuousness. His publisher failed him here. A much better book on quite similar themes, including a Nieman fellowship episode, is Paul Hemphill's "Leaving Birmingham."

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A truly touching Horatio Alger story .
Review: This may be one of the most important books I have read in my life. Essentially it is a Horatio Alger story of an individual that raises himself out of abject poverty to a position of high respect and the truly honorable way that a poor family conducts itself even without material resources.

This book touched my heart and I'm sure the heart of all of its readers because there is much of each of us in this book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A wonderful book with honest feelings about life.
Review: I can not say when I've enjoyed a book so much. Every page is filled with such emotion thats so real that I can about picture myself in that setting. I am about four years older than the author and can about imagine some of the same events that happen in my life. I admire his love for his mother and brothers and think that any who reads this book will profit from it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: like it is
Review: I lived in Anniston for several years, about the time Rick Bragg was writing for the Anniston Star, and I imagine we read a lot of his stuff. Who knew? Both of our kids were born in Jacksonville in the "new" hospital and we came to love the area. We're back home in Tennessee now, and his look at northeast Alabama was like a present. As a child of the South, I love his pictures of the life and culture of the South. That's really the way it is. However, like the guy from Sacramento, I think they need to get him another proofreader for his next book. Maybe the one he had just thought it was southern English.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An absolutely wonderful read!!!
Review: Rick Bragg certianly writes like a man possessed to bring forth a story that has to be told. The story is masterfully woven to explain a gripping tale of honest gratitude toward a mother. --One of the most honest stories that I have read in quite a long while.


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