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Summary: AVA'S MAN HITS HOME
Review: As a native Californian whose debut novel is in its initial release, I found myself fascinated by Rick Bragg's AVA'S MAN. Bragg's book is a biography of his maternal grandmother--a man he never knew yet grew to love through his research. My fascination with Bragg's book began on largely personal terms. Bragg's story of his grandfather could have easily been a story about my grandfather. Charlie Bundrum was born early in the last century and lived a hardscrabble life in the South. My maternal grandfather was born at about the same time and lived his entire life in Alabama. Charlie fought the good fight, and he struggled valiantly against poverty. He never got too far from it, but he did the best he could. Married at 17, he supported his family and planted the roots from which future generations grew. Charlie died young--at age fifty. My grandfather died in his thirties. Both men were survived by remarkable Southern women. Charlie's daughter gave birth to Rick Bragg. My grandfather's depression-era orphaned daughter gave birth to me. Once I read AVA'S MAN, I acquired a knowledge of what my mother's life in her youth was possibly like, and I began to understand her lifelong reluctance to discuss it in detail with any of her California children.
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Summary: Just finished it last night, dammit
Review: Rick Bragg is one of my favorite authors; if you read this book, you'll understand why. It's the story of a man he never met, his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, who died a year before Bragg was born. The story is told through the masterful sewing together of snippets of memories of his relatives, achieving the status of near folk history as Bragg creates a whole quilt from a pile of scraps.
Beautiful writing about a man all of us would have been privileged to know, an illiterate man, a wonderful father, a 'pretty good husband,' a God-fearing man who never set foot in a church, a man some would dismiss as an Alabama hillbilly - but never would they say that, having once read this book.
More than having written just a memoir of a memorable man, Rick Bragg celebrates an entire family, a class of people, a region of our country, and the generations of those whose lives spanned both sides of the Depression.
Read it. You're gonna love it.
Rating:
Summary: Just . . . well . . . Wonderful!
Review: This beautiful, tragic, compelling, and ultimately stellar book will be around for quite a while. Something as good as this doesn't fade away after its inital release and we can only hope that Bragg has more books in him.The most riveting aspect of this excellent read is the fact that Bragg gives us a remarkable story using anything BUT sterotypes. Thank goodness, for it's about time someone looked outside of the cliche that all southerners are ignorant, backwards, "Deliverance" types. If only more people would read and understand what the south is really like. Also recommended: The Color Purple, Bark of the Dogwood, Fried Green Tomaotes
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Summary: THE STORY OF A MAN - MAGNIFICENTLY TOLD
Review: Few can evoke an accurate image of the Deep South. Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg (All Over But The Shoutin') does more than evoke it, he paints it in bold Mondrian-like brush strokes and chiaroscuro. The time and place come alive before our delighted eyes. "Ava's Man" is a very personal history, it's the story of Bragg's mother's childhood in the dirt poor Appalachian foothills during the Depression, and it's a tribute to her father, Charlie Bondrun, the grandfather Bragg knows only through stories and reminiscences. Of this man the author writes, ".....if he ever was good at one thing on this earth, it was being a daddy." Charlie, the father of seven always hungry children, moved his family 29 times during the depression. He worked wherever he could - sometimes for pay, at other times for a side of bacon or a basket of fruit. The doctor who delivered his fourth daughter, Bragg's mother, was paid with a bottle of whiskey. Charlie was not an educated man. His wife, Ava, read the paper to him every day so he would be informed. But, he was a clever man - could make a boat out of car hoods, and he played the banjo, and he could dance. Most importantly, despite the hardships, the deprivation, he knew how to make his family know they were loved. This is Ava's story, Charlie's story, and the story of a time in our history, magnificently told.
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Summary: The Best Southern Book Since "Prince Of Tides"
Review: I was born and raised in the very woods and mountains Ricky Bragg writes of, and he makes them seem new and magical even though I've seen them every day of my life.
I worked in a Textile Plant fresh out of high school and didn't make much, but once a month I went to Salvation Army to buy 25 cent books, and I found "All Over but The Shoutin" and knew I'd never find a author so close to home.
Ava's Man, made me cry and curse and run to my Daddy when I needed to know which river or road Ricky was talking about, and my Daddy would alwasy swell up and explain to me where it was and add a short story about it.
This book isn't a fancy story about huge white houses and sprawling orchards, its a simple book about a simple man that would other wise be forgotten.
Charlie reminds me of my Daddy, and my Paw Paw and his Daddy before.
A dying breed of men with strong work ethics and big hearts, and a taste for the likker.
My Daddys eyes are bad and he cant read, but he enjoyed the pages I read to him, and my family would ask me to copy pages and we would all sit around and agree with Bragg on holidays.
Maybe it sounds lame, but this book brought my family together.
With his Cracklin bread and c'modity cheese. The likker and catfish, and of course the small strong women with hands as rough as a man and a tongue twice as sharp.
If you want to know the ways of Alabama, and the culture we pass down, read this book, slide into the slang and enjoy yourself...I know I did.
Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful peak at an American family!
Review: Well after reading this book, two things became clear to me: the first is that Mr. Bragg has a wonderful writing style that can make some ordinary things into a magical and warm experience; and second is that I was quite surprised about the story line. I feel guilty just saying this but rarely in our society do we have a positive mental image when we speak of poor Southerners. This book allowed me (a "northerner") to understand what life was actually like for southern folks in the early part of the 1900's, showing us that they weren't minority hating, wife beating drunken, white hoods wearing thrash. WHAT A WONDERFUL BREATH OF FRESH AIR! It is a great book to read about family struggle in general without looking at a map, but I think it does teach us a couple of lessons too. Imagine if each of us were as proud of our family as Mr. Bragg is of his, how wonderful we would feel??
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Summary: The grandfather you never knew
Review: I never knew my grandfather but have always heard stories about his rough and tumble life. This book could be about anyone's grandfather who came from a poor family, worked manual labor jobs untill the day he died, and raised a half dozen kids that worshiped him. It is touching, well written, and introduces you (in a way) to the grandfather you never knew.
Rating:
Summary: Tough call
Review: It's hard to pinpoint which I liked more: the story itself or the style in which it was written. I suppose if the writing hadn't been so beautiful and clear I wouldn't have finished the book in the first place. Bragg's story, although a non-fiction account, has the characteristics of good fiction. His grandfather came through as a believable character because his faults were displayed just enough to balance out the honorable parts. The words Bragg chose when writing this book make the story flow smoothly and much of it can aptly be described as poetic. I came to know Charlie Bundrum just as sure as if I'd met him because he'd been re-constructed for me. It's tempting to describe Bragg's portrayal as "brilliant" or "gifted", etc. But I'll leave those words for the people who get paid to write reviews. Taking ink and paper and crafting living and breathing people is an art, and Bragg succeeds at it beautifully.
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Summary: So much and more
Review: I came to know about this book from seeing Rick Bragg on a "Book TV" episode one Sunday afternoon. He was so down to earth and funny, I wanted to know more about him. I was searching for All Over But the Shoutin, when I found Ava's Man instead, so I grabbed it. It has been the most fun, best book I've read in a good while. You see my family is from the area he writes about. My mother was born in Anniston, Al. a few years before Charlie Bundrum. She and her family lived through the same hard times. It lets me know about the culture, and the poor but proud attitude of my mothers family. I've heard of family members being "run off." I've got the black cast iron skillet that made all the moves through the depression. I've heard the superstitions mentioned in the book from my own family.
Rick Bragg has given me a look into my ancestors daily lives. If you are at all interested in genealogy from the South, if you have family that is gone now and can't shed some light on the way things were, you'll enjoy this book.
Like the previous reviewer that said Charlie was not what hero's are made of, that may be true, but your family tree is your family tree. The good bad and the ugly. Their strengths let them survive and gave us the chance to be born. The previous reviewers boasts about what he chooses to do in his profession would not be a hero in my eyes. Give me Charlie anyday. He loved life.
Rating: 
Summary: A mighty thin mix to try to cast a hero from
Review: I read Rick Bragg's book, ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN' and felt uplifted and proud of my poor, rural southern heritage. AVA'S MAN did not leave me with the same pride of place and time. I was born in 1935 in rural Arkansas and picked my first cotton in my maternal grandfather's and his neighbor's fields as a four year child. Although my folks were what others have characterized as "the gentle poor" as opposed to what they characterize as "poor white trash", I worked with and alongside and lived among whole communities of folks like the Bundrums. When and where I grew up, men like Charlie Bundrum were not heroes. Chronic drunks who die early of cirrhosis with no provision for their widows and children, who were brawlers and jail birds were not a breed to be celebrated even though their children might have loved them and their grandchildren, for their own not so difficult to understand reasons, placed them on a pedestal. In the rural south of Charlie's day, fighting among children trying to find their place in the pecking order of a three room school was standard, but heroic men fought only under extreme provocation and their fights were often to the death. If there is a hero in AVA'S MAN, it is Ava, not her man. Charlie Bundrum did a little too much likkerin', brawling, drunken driving, fishing and general carousing for my taste in heroes, and casting him as one creates a model that has been followed by far too many young of the underclass of southern white male to the downfall of thousands of their families and communities. Bragg's mother was very rightly the hero of his first family memoir, and his father the heavy. I suppose he needed some male in his direct line of ancestors to carry the mantle of the hero, but Grandfather Charlie seems to provide very little cement, to go along with all the likker and sand, for the casting of the likeness of a real hero. I started reading this book fully prepared to praise it, as so many of it's reviewers have. I ended it depressed and sorry that Charlie's life was not one that I find heroic. God knows, we could use a few more of these among the poor southern white male, but it seems that most of our poor white Dixie heros have been female, and our male heroes have been, to a large extent, black. wfh
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