Rating: 
Summary: Another Work of Art!
Review: I fell in love with Rick Bragg's writing in All Over but the Shoutin' and didn't think he could ever surpass it. I was very wrong. I started Ava's Man yesterday afternoon and didn't stop till I was finished. With the story of his mother in Shoutin I learned how it was to grow up in the south with his mother, 3 brothers and an alcoholic father who was never around. I wondered at the time where his mother got her backbone from and in Ava's Man I found out. His maternal grandfather, Charles Bundrum, was a true man of the south. He raised 7 children during the depression with little or no money and he raised them all solid. He had to move his family 21 times to keep one step ahead of poverty. He worked where ever there was work and he made moonshine. He lived his life as a man and loved his family. Charles could have been an angry man but , he wasn't. He was a legend in his own time and I am so glad that Mr Bragg took the time to tell his story. This is a great piece of southeren literature with almost lyrical prose that will be very hard to forget.
Rating:
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.
Rating: 
Summary: His best yet
Review: This is Rick Bragg's best yet. I was really interested. The man really knows how to turn a word. Rick Bragg and Homer Hickam had their first memoirs come out the same time in 1998. They're both great writers of southern literature and I love their work.
Rating:
Summary: Another Stirring Family Chronicle from Rick Bragg
Review: In his first book, All Over But the Shoutin', Rick Bragg wrote about growing up desperately poor in the northeastern Alabama foothills, and about his mother's courageous struggle to keep the family together in spite of a hard-drinking, absentee husband and the condescension of so many "higher class" neighbors. In Ava's Man, Bragg goes back even further in the family history, to his own mother's childhood and the figure who had almost mythical stature in the family: her father, Braggs' grandfather, who died a year before Bragg was born and whose life he has painstakingly reconstructed through the stories of surviving family and friends. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer and carpenter by trade, though he was also a fisherman and banjo picker and buck dancer and maker of illegal whiskey ("the fines likker on either side of the state line"). Bundrum was, in many ways, like other Appalachian men of his generation. He regularly came home drunk, got into fights, and had run-ins with the law. But he had a devotion to his children that was extraordinary in any age and any culture. Not just the kind of devotion that kept him working any job he could to feed his kids, but a real tenderness and a fierce protectiveness that gave the family a sense of stability otherwise sorely lacking in their peripatetic Depression-era existence. Bragg is careful not to deify Charlie. He's a flawed and fallible man, but one who happens to be more vital, and more loving, than most. Charlie Bundrum is also part of an Appalachian culture that's virtually disappeared. Bragg poignantly describes the changes that began creeping over the wild Alabama and Georgia hills as early as the 1940s: the highways and paved roads, the dams, the encroaching beaurocratization that meant a man could no longer outrun the police and disappear into the woods.
Rating:
Summary: BEST YET BY BRAGG
Review: I'm a fan of literary journalism who got her hands on an advance copy of AVA'S MAN, and let me tell you, it doesn't disappoint. Told in the same lyrical, easy-going prose as ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING, this tribute to Bragg's grandfather is like a history lesson of life in the true South at the first half of this century. As a southerner, I've almost given up on southern writers, who produce a life that neither I nor my parents even recognize, but about three pages into this book, I told my husband: "This is the real thing." With no trace of sentimentality and no glorification of violence, Bragg tells a story so honest and unvarnished that it could really be any of our grandfathers. In fact, half way through I became convinced we were long-lost cousins, so close and personal were his stories, and predict that when the book arrives in the stores in August, that will the universal reaction. In a time in our history when all that is southern seems to be slipping away, Rick Bragg relights an old flame. We're lucky to have him.
Rating:
Summary: Reading Doesn¿t Get Much Better
Review: And if reading does indeed improve there is a high probability that Rick Bragg will write it. His first book, "All Over But The Shoutin", was a remarkable book and was recognized as such. And when a group of his stories were collected for, "Somebody Told Me", it contained shorter works that can stand with any that have appeared, whether fiction or non-fiction. I don't understand why this new work, "Ava's Man" is touted as a continuation of his first book. It is true the work expands on the history of his Family, but it is more of a prequel, exploring his Grandfather, Rick's Mother, and her Sisters. The distinction is important, for if you are expecting part two of Shoutin, which is not what you will get. I want to be clear; I am not criticizing this book. There is no one else writing today that I enjoy reading more. This new work is different, and the reasons are clear, the Author almost states as much in his comments. In his previous work he has written either about his own experiences from a child to the writer he is today, or he was writing his first hand accounts of events as he experienced them. In, "Ava's Man", he is relating a story of a man he never knew as told, by among others, his Mother and his Aunts. The result of his collecting and relating the stories of others requires he be faithful to what they share. This same requirement left him little space to write prose that is totally unique and his own. There were bits of the book where he would introduce an idea, or summarize a lifestyle or a manner of speaking, and the writing was pure Rick Bragg Poetry. But this was not the rule. For me the following type of sentence is what makes Rick Bragg stand alone, "This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven". Call it prose, poetry or music; it is amazing use of the language. He said that this book was requested by people who felt he left out his Mother's story. Readers wanted to know where this remarkable woman was from, and who were the Parents that brought her along. Mr. Bragg even states that this is "their" book, the result of people stopping him in Airports and book signings and telling him he shortchanged his Mama. The previous two books were both works that I wished there were more than 5 stars to express the talent of this man. This book too is excellent, and well beyond what most writers will ever approach. It also is different, not flawed or weak, just different. Individual readers will decide whether this shade of Rick Bragg is one they like better or less. I hope he is working on a dozen new books.
Rating:
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: 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.
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: 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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