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Summary: Story about the untold American Dream
Review: This is a great book! It's basically a book about a poor southern family making it through the Great Depression and into the 50's led by their illeterate father. It made me thankful for how good we have it now and sorry about all the family connection we've lost in trade for the material stuff.
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Summary: Rick Bragg just gets better and better
Review: I love the way this man writes. It is so gentle, soothing and beautiful. He writes with love about his family, and pride and that just glows in the pages. When he could use a dry phrase to relate something to the reader he chooses something bordering on romance and wonder. He leaves the reader with that warm fuzzy feeling that makes you want to get on a plane and go and meet these people so you can share their joy and their pain too.I came across "Shoutin' " by accident but fell in love with it. I have recommended it to friends and book clubs and now everyone is clammering for my copy of this book. When you are so far away from a good english bookstore - then something this special becomes a treasure.
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Summary: It just doesn't get any better than this!
Review: With so many good reviews already written, I thought, why bother? Then, I thought, I simply have to add my two cents worth. This book is so good, because, not only is it a truthful account of a real time, a real man and a real family, but also because Bragg has a special gift for telling it. I saw, in another review, that Bragg was compared to a modern day Dickins and I must say, I agree. There is no story out there, that would not be enhanced by being written or told by Rick Bragg. He is on his way to becomming a master.
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Summary: A bit much ...
Review: I was delighted to discover this book by a very talented writer, because it's very easy to admire his use of language and descriptive passages. What Bragg needs, perhaps, is a better editor to pull him away from some of his excesses. About midway through this book, I began to wonder what made Bragg lucky enough to have such an interesting and incredibly special family. One questions whether Bragg is more interested in pleasing his readers or in pleasing his family with a loving tribute. Loving tributes are fine, but they tend to get a bit boring as literature. Bragg resorts to meaningless praises again and again ("It's just the kind of man he was...") to the point of sounding dishonest. AFter all, this is a man he never met, reconstructed from the memories of his biased relatives. Some other nitpicks: Bragg's insistent use of the misspelling "likker" for local color and his overuse of the one-sentence paragraph for emphasis. However, these criticisms should not obscure the value of this book. Charlie is a wonderful character who has been reconstructed from dusty memories and family stories. He symbolizes a certain kind of man from a certain of place. He's not perfect and maybe he wasn't so different, either. One other thing: I love the way Bragg writes about food. I wish he would write a cookbook.
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Summary: A heart of deep eddies, and the moon above
Review: This book speaks in eloquent detail of the American South, of the Depression, about moonshine, and Revenuers and swamps, and it serves as a fine history lesson because of that detail. But Ava's Man isn't about those things. It's about the hidden heart of a uniquely American man, and the mighty love of his family. It serves as an exalted, tender demonstration of the heroic strength in simply keeping on. In rendering this one man's violent inner majesty so clearly, Bragg has made a fine portrait of the clash between an increasingly settled, mercantile way of life and the brave individualism Americans may wish to believe still defines them. I have never loved a book so much as this one.
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Summary: Great Life Story...
Review: I read both, all over but the shoutin and Ava's man in one week. What a wonderful week it was! I enjoyed every minute of the time I spent in Alabama and Georgia. I loved Charlie and Ava. Rick Bragg's family tree is incredibly colorful, they make my family seem downright dull. I hope we see more of Mr. Bragg's talented writing on the shelves soon!
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Summary: Rick Bragg doesn't disappoint
Review: This was one of the most enjoyable books that I've read in a long time. I was enthralled from the first page to the last. Rick Bragg chronicles the history of his family, in particular, the grandfather that he never knew, Charlie. Bragg really knows how to tell a story well. He tells stories that on the surface seem as if they are hardships faced by his grandparents during the Depression-Era South. But once you untangle his lovely writing, you discover that the book isn't about the hardships, but about the many (however small they were) triumphs the family shared. I was dreading the last chapter - I would have loved to hear more about Charlie and Ava. Rick Bragg has a gift for storytelling that his grandfather would have been proud of.
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Summary: "All his kind are gone."
Review: "A man like that," Pulitzer Prize-winner, Rick Bragg, writes about his maternal grandfather, "probably deserves a book" (p. 9). Charlie Bundrum, born at the turn of the century in either Alabama or Georgia, "depending on how lost you are," was a carpenter, moonshiner, poacher, and father of seven children (p. 8). He was a man who, forty-two years later, was so beloved and so missed that the mere mention of his 1958 death would make his daughters cry (p. 9). In a biography peppered with anecdotes, Bragg leads us down one dirt road after the next, into the backwoods of the Deep South during the Great Depression, to introduce us to a man he never actually met. Charlie was a backwoods legend, "a hero" who took giant steps in his run-down boots, who drank one pint of every gallon of the moonshine "likker" he sold, who beat another man nearly to death for throwing a live snake at his son, who shot a large woman with a shotgun when she came at him with a butcher knife, who threw two highway patrolmen out of a beer joint headfirst, and a father who poached wildlife just to feed his hungry babies. A coffeehouse acquaintance recommended this book to me as one of his favorite books. In AVA'S MAN, Rick Bragg has painted a portrait of a man I won't soon forget. G. Merritt
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Summary: just wonderful
Review: My mother gave me this to read, and i resisted becuse of the title and cover, what a fool i was. what a wonderful read, other reviewers cover the plot, so just get copy and enjoy. am reading the authors other books.
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Summary: a paean to the rural south
Review: "Ava's Man" is a loving tribute to Rick Bragg's maternal grandfather, written in his trademark spare, elegant prose. It is also a paean to the rural South and to a vanished way of life. In the southern tradition of looking to the past, Bragg has reconstructed the short, difficult, meaningful life of Charlie Bundrum. He must have relied heavily on the memories of his mother, Margaret, who was perhaps the neediest of Charlie's brood, and thus the closest to her father. Charlie was a man who was fiercely protective of his eight children, and a hard-working father who would do just about anything to provide for them. He died at 51, worn out from long years of labor, and suffering from a liver ailment caused by decades of drinking moonshine. Having just reviewed "...and Ladies of the Club", this reviewer cannot help contrasting the southern culture Bragg describes with the midwestern, community-minded society of that book. Few men of Charlie's era in that society died so young. The midwest is filled with long-lived descendants of the Germans and Scandinavians who first populated the area. This is just one of the many north/south differences which will become apparent as you read Bragg's book.
Charlie was a proud, independent man, in the Jeffersonian tradition. Family came first in his hardscrabble life, although he was charitable, taking in an outcast older man who lived with the family for many years. Bragg has done a wonderful job of fleshing out the grandfather he never knew. In "Ava's Man" you will find it easy to look beyond the southern stereotypes to find
the real man, Charlie Bundrum. Highly recommended!
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