Ava's Man

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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: 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: Moonshine for the spirit!
Review: How can I add to what others have said? This is life distilled, 100-proof stuff that will make your head spin. This is life reduced to its rawboned, hard-scrabble, drinking and loving and dancing wonderfulness. This is a classic memoir that ranks with Crew's A CHILDHOOD: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE.

Destitute, disappointed, depressed, disillusioned, disenfanchised -- so what? Read this book and you'll soar on the possibilities of the human spirit. You'll witness lives that rise above discouragement by sheer will. They just do it.

Charlie Bundrum is a man for the ages. He was rough, tough, and difficult. But he loved and protected and made life possible for his family. These vignettes, chapter after chapter, are offered in the tradition of oral folklore, a history of the Deep South, a time when men fished and brawled, drank moonshine and held babies, stood firm with children and neighbors, by fist or gunshot -- all in the same day -- and that was life.

What a life! What a book! What a writer!

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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.

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Summary: another good author
Review: I first read Mr Bragg's 'It's all over but the shoutin' a few years ago. When I saw that he had written another book about his family I knew I would want to read it. Although I didn't think this book was quite as good as 'shoutin' it is a good book. He takes us into his family. My favorite line in 'shoutin' is when he questions his mom about being out in the cotton fields picking cotton while she had to pull him along as he sat on her sack. He asks her how she did it and her reply was 'you weren't heavy'....that is a mother's love in perfection. Ava's Man takes us back to mountain life and moonshine and local law. I think the author does an excellent job of telling us how life was years ago even though he was not there. How wonderful that he has all this family history.

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Summary: So much and more
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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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: Just . . . well . . . Wonderful!
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.

Rating:
Summary: "A larger-than-life tale"
Review: Like All Over But the Shoutin', Ava's Man is a continuation of Bragg's-a local boy made good-personal history of his Alabama roots. This time, instead of telling his mom's dirt-poor yet heroic tale, he follows the larger-than-life tale of his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a man he never met. Touching stuff that many Alabamians will relate to. My father is utterly taken with Bragg's memoirs.


Rating:
Summary: I'd Like You To Meet Charlie
Review: What a beautiful story! Not often does one have the opportunity to read a book that captures the essence of a man and a time and place gone forever.

Even though the lifestyle he describes is foreign to most readers, Rick Bragg has the ability to introduce you to his grandfather, spin stories about his life, and make you cry at his death.

Even though the culture of the Old South as lived by the poor, hard-working and hard-living white folk from Alabama and Georgia of the 20's, 30's, and 40's is lost forever, Bragg has the ability to insert you in the midst of that time and feel the kinship and love of family, the hard-living and hard-dying.

Rick Bragg never personally knew his grandfather. After hearing the stories of his life from the many old friends and relatives he got to know Charlie Bundrum well. Fortunately, through Bragg's talent, he has written a beautiful story and I have had the pleasure to know Charlie too. I would have liked him and I think you will too.