All Over but the Shoutin': A Memoir [Paperback]

ANew York TimesNotable Book of the Year

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter forThe New York Times.It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most.

But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives--and the country that shaped and nourished them--with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings home the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family. The result is unforgettable. A grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love...he will make you cry. —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Part memoir, part confession, [this book] has everything to do with the South and nothing at all.... Like all good writing, it transcends the particulars of time and place. —Raleigh News & Observer

A record of a life that has been harrowing, cruel and yet triumphant, written so beautifully he makes the book a marvel. —Los Angeles Times

A deeply affecting book.... Bragg captures the rhythms of small-town life with grace and pathos. —Chicago TribuneRick Bragg is a national correspondent for the New York Times. He is based in Atlanta, Georgia.The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Rick Bragg'sAll Over but the Shoutin', a haunting memoir about growing up dirt-poor in the deep South, and about strugglils#