Books › All over but the shoutin'
All over but the shoutin'
480 pages
A lyrical, fiercely loving tribute to a mother's sacrifice and the inescapable gravity of a Southern childhood.
What it feels like
Reading this memoir feels like sitting on a porch in the deep Southern heat, listening to a master storyteller unspool a family history that is equal parts bruising and beautiful. The pace is steady and deliberate, allowing the lush, musical prose to wash over you as it paints vivid portraits of red dirt, crushing poverty, and fierce maternal love. It carries a deeply soulful, melancholic mood, steeped in the ache of survivor's guilt and the raw reality of the American margin. Yet, beneath the grit and the sorrow, there is an undeniable current of reverence and redemption. It will profoundly move readers who appreciate emotionally devastating, beautifully crafted true stories about the sacrifices we make for love and the places that forge us.
- Mood
- soulful
- melancholic
- gritty
- evocative
- Tone
- reverent
- raw
- nostalgic
- bittersweet
- earnest
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- maternal sacrifice · generational poverty · survivor's guilt · the weight of memory · Southern identity
- The writing
- Lush, lyrical, and deeply steeped in the musical cadences of Southern oral storytelling.
- The arc
- Journeys from the visceral ache of childhood deprivation to a soaring, tear-stained culmination of gratitude and redemption.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave emotionally devastating, beautifully crafted memoirs that explore the fierce bonds of family and the scars of poverty.
Content notes
- poverty
- alcoholism
- domestic abuse
- child neglect
- parental abandonment
About the book
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 reporter for The 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.
Description from Open Library.
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