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Summary: This book is really somethin', as my granny would have said!
Review: What most impresses me about Ava's Man is Rick Bragg's intense passionate need (and ability) to communicate the worthiness and value of his family, his people. To show how people that don't look and talk fancy are just as worthy as people that do. But on top of that, there are some great stories in here--better than in most novels. I love the part where his car ends up downstream and they think he's drowned but he's just stuck in jail. I love how the family takes the eccentric Hootie like a puppy but still manages to treat him with great dignity. I love the story about shooting that big old lady through the....well you'll have to read to find out I reckon. Thanks Mr. Bragg...
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Summary: Simply, Fiercely Beautiful
Review: Though I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me before, this book was even better than "All Over But the Shoutin'". In fact, I read it seven or eight times (at least--hard to keep track when I would fall into it every time I tried to move it off the desk) in the first month I owned it. Rick Bragg made my Christmas shopping easy: I just bought nine copies of "Ava's Man" and gave one to everyone on my list. His writing is still spare and beautiful and well worthy of the Pulitzer his news stories earned him, and the story he's telling here is fierce and sad and funny and ... true. Heartbreakingly true. This book should be required reading for students of history, of literture, of sociology, and of humanity. I can't recommmend it highly enough.
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Summary: An Interesting Life
Review: The author never knew his grandfather. Yet he introduces the reader to him with such stories and descriptions that this reader is left feeling he is someone he has known. Ava's Man begins just prior to the birth of Charlie Bundrum in 1907 and continues until beyond his death. It is a story of a man coping with whatever life has to offer. The author captures the language and modes of people living in rural Alabama and Georgia in the early twentieth century while giving a vivid description of their life particularly in the depression and World War ll periods. Though the family suffered hard times, Ava's Man brought them through with hard work while earning respect of those who knew him. Since the author was born after the death of his grandfather, his information was gleaned from his older relatives and friends who had known him. A man named Hootie who was befriended by Charlie Bundrum adds color to this family story. A very enjoyable book.
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Summary: soaring, compelling and inspiring addition to family memoir
Review: As impossible as it may seem, Rick Bragg's soaring, compelling and inspiring "Ava's Man," his account of the life and time of his maternal grandfather, eclipses "All Over but the Shoutin.'" I find it difficult to describe the impact this astounding memoir had on me; I can honestly tell you that I have never wept or laughed (often simultaneously) over the pages of a book as I did while reading "Ava's Man." This work contains more raw material on what life should mean to us and how to live that life than most undergraduate educations. Through handsomely crafted anecdotes, Bragg has constructed a unique homage -- to a person, place and time which have passed from the American scene. As we learn who Charlie Bundrum was, what motivated him and how deeply he influenced those who loved and respected him, we discover a genuine American archtype by which we can measure our own lives. A memoir Americans will treasure for decades to come, its author has now elevated himself to the highest level of our national letters. The introduction and epilogue alone richly outline the Charlie Bundrum's essential qualities. A powerful roofer and talented distiller, an angry, violent man who desperately loved and protected his family, a fiercely resilient man who disdained societal restrictions, Charlie Bundrum would be painfully out of place in the modern South. "It is only when you compare him with today...that he seems larger than life. The difference between then and now is his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it." Rick Bragg describes his grandfather as a man "whose wings never quite fit him." Charlie Bundrum took "giant steps in run-down boots" during the Great Depression, a time of genuine, near desperate want in the rural South. As a child, Bundrum grew up "in hateful poverty, fought it all his life and died with nothing but a family that worshiped him and a name that glows like new money." Though he moved his family over twenty times during the Depression, his influence on this loved ones was absolute. He was so beloved, so missed, "that the mere mention of his death would make [his grown daughters] cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky." Rick Bragg's storytelling abilities and extraordinary character sketches draw the reader intimately into the Bundrum family circle. Bragg's metaphors, piquant, homey and authentic, lend a sense of poetry and size. For example, Charlie Bundrum's hands, "finger-crushing, freakishly strong" (he could "bend a ten-penny nail in his fingers"), and his forearms, "hard as fence posts," symbolize the man. The author's descriptive prose is so pure, so plain, so true, that in places "Ava's Man" emerges as this generation's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." The physical setting of the memoir is the hill and river region of northern Alabama and Georgia. There Charles spent an impoverished youth under the supervision of his hard-bitten father, Jimmy Jim, a dominant man who once bit off a foe's finger during a free-for-all. From his father, Charles inherited fearlessness. "Too wild for church, too raggedy for the Kiwanis Club," Charles loved the untamed reaches of the Coosa River; "this was his place, even though he did not own enough of it to fill a snuffbox." As an adult, he lived by his own cardinal rule of fatherhood: "don't let nothin' happen" to the children. The grinding poverty of the Depression only sharpened his instincts; yet the privations of the time would result in the premature death of an infant daughter, the only time his family saw him "whipped" by circumstances. No saint, the Charlie Bundrum we encounter also has a "hot, dark basement" where genuine anger lives. As a fighter, he hit hard, unrelentingly so and he taught his sons to do the same. He was a considerable drinker, downing a pint of his "likker" for every gallon he lovingly distilled. "His product was clean,pure and safe as Kool-Aid" at a time when others' hooch could kill you. He was a brawler with the law as well, giving and taking licks to officers capable of catching him. It really doesn't matter where you turn in "Ava's Man;" Charlie Bundrum emerges larger than life. Despite his own family's poverty, he adopts Hootie -- a misshapen, lonely older man -- and protects him with a devotion that is part ferocity and part altruism. Charlies' courage is the stuff of myth; in Bragg's capable hands, Charlie's encounters with bull-headed or misguided adversaries embellish his daughter Margaret's assessment of him: "I knew nothing could ever hurt me with Daddy there. I knew he would never let it happen." Though Charlie Bundrum is the focus of "Ava's Man," Rick Bragg's gifted writing sustains the narrative. The author's recounting of family tragedies, like the terrifying accidental burning of his mother when she was but a small child, is told with astonishing bluntness. Yet, his language is so profound, so direct, so genuine, so elementally true, that the stuff of the Bundrums' lives become transcendent, metaphorical, universal. "Ava's Man" may become one of the most vital books you will have read in your life.
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Summary: A magnificent tribute to a grandfather he never met...
Review: When Rick Bragg started to ask his great aunts and others about his grandfather (who died before his birth), the responses tended to involve tears. That fact helped to compel Bragg to find out more about this beloved man. Charlie Bundrum, his maternal grandfather, was a Depression roofer, fisherman, moonshine cooker, and father of Bragg's aunts and uncles. He lived in hard times and yet treated people justly. He was so angered by the constant bullying of a hermit by a group of men that he took the man in (Hootie) and made him part of the family. Such a decent person and backwoods legend was he that when he passed away, lines of vehicles stretched along the road to the cemetery.
Successfully raising a large family during the Depression would have been enough to grant the man sainthood status, but Bragg does a magnificent job of outlining the complexities of making ends meet - to the extent that hunger was at the door for many years. He never denies the reader the opportunity to see his grandfather's faults and yet he never apologizes for them or excuses them away. He is careful to describe the love Charlie had for his wife and particularly his daughters without making it ever maudlin or treacle-y. He does his grandfather a great justice by having done his best research and found out, to the heart, what the man was like. It is always a shame to lose a grandfather before you have a chance to know and love him - but Rick Bragg has done a great job of finding, knowing and loving his.
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Summary: I am crazy about Rick Bragg
Review: I was lucky enough to hear Mr. Bragg speak at a writers symposium after I had read his first book"All Over but the Shoutin'"and I have been a huge fan ever since."Ava's Man" may be even better,if that is possible.His prose is so beautiful and so haunting.I have never had a more intense experiance with a book than I had with these.Please read them they are truly wonderful.5 stars are not enough.
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Summary: Bragg sure likes to brag
Review: Bragg loves words. He's very skillful with them. He loves his Southern roots, and this story about his grandfather highlights the man's integrity and love for life. But he cannot get out of the way in telling the story. His clever phrases are so abundant they become irritating. One wants to shout, "Get out of the way and let Charlie do the talking!" The author was omnipresent, so full of himself, so wanting the reader to know that he was a Very Clever Writer. It's a good story, and if you don't mind the author's overweening self-consciousness you just might like the book.
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Summary: This hit home.
Review: I grew up in some ways, the same as the people profiled in this beautiful story of a man who, though flawed, was truly a giant among men. I was reminded of my own childhood, and my father, who was, in many ways, so like Charlie Bundrum. The story brought tears to my eyes from time to time, with just remembering
Although the depression was difficult for all who lived in the south, and elsewhere I'm sure, it was made easier by people like the ones profiled in this book. I recommend it.
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Summary: One of the best pieces of Southern Literature out today
Review: I read Mr Bragg's first book about his mother, and it didn't move me like this book. However,once I read this book, I understood better. This book about a simple man who lived as best as he could during the worst part of the twentieth century really moved me. perhaps because he was an ordinary man, perhaps he had no one to remember him save his own children and those who are still alive , but Charlie Bundrum's story was one of the most moving books I read in 2001. It should get an award. It tells the story of Margaret Bundrum's father, who was a hard working man(the worst he ever done was have a still for moonshine still and shoot two people for trying to disturb his household).Who died relatively young. Yet, his grandson, who was born one year after his passing, tells his story as though he knew him well. Makes you want to meet him and shake his hand. In my opinion, it is one of the best pieces of Southern literature out there today. It deserves the five stars I'm giving it, and everyone who feels that they don't have nothing and feel they have nothing should read it, and be thankful for what they got.By the way, this book was voted by the City of Mobile,Alabama, for its book to be read by each citizen. We are celebrating our tricentennial, and if you can, come on down!!
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Summary: It left me awe-inspired!
Review: What a fantastic piece of writing! Rick Bragg has honored the memory of his family in a way I'm sure we all wish we could.
This poignant look at the hardscrabble life of a Southern family is both heartbreaking and hilarious. I will be recommending this book to all my friends without hesitation. To quote Ava, "I ain't goin get me no man, I had me one" That she did.
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