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May 13, 2008

Mister Jones rated it:

I read this one awhile back, and I loved it.

I tend to like confessional autobiographies that don't shy away from flaws and shortcomings, and so I tend to be partial to works that are.

Bragg's book is all that and then some--growing up poor in Alabama, small town with the those who have too much and those who have too little, and having to deal with it with the support of his mother. It's tough writing, gritty, and in your face with no apologies and lots of personal pain. More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2008

Caley rated it:

This book is FILLED with wonderful imagery and is the memior of New York Times write Rick Bragg. Here's a quotation: "This is not an important book... Anyone could tell it, anyone who had a momma who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes, who picked cotton in other people's fields and ironed other people's clothes and cleaned the mess in other people's houses, so that her children didn't have to live on welfare alone, so that one of them could cl More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 24, 2008

Jenny rated it:

Published in 1998, I believe, this memoir describes the author's childhood growing up very poor in rural Alabama and his path towards becoming a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the New York Times. The final chapters are absolutely beautiful and it was nice to end the book on a high note, because parts of the story became very stale for me. I give the author a lot of credit for being honest about himself and his weaknesses (the chip on his shoulder about growing up poor and not having acces More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 28, 2008

Gianna rated it:

I was working in a bookstore when this book came out. I personally must have sold 100 copies. Rich's family was poor, super poor. Dirt poor in fact. When Rick won the Pulitzer for a story he wrote on Haiti for the St. Pete Times, he could have bought his mother a set of false teeth or he could have taken time off to write a book for her. He wrote a book for her. From the prologue:

"Anyone who had a mamma who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have scho More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 29, 2007

Jennifer rated it:

http://mulibiiidb.marshall.edu:80/record...

Self-described paid-storyteller and Pulitzer-Prize-winning-narrative-journalist, Rick Bragg has used the storytelling techniques he learned from his people to write two best-selling memoirs that redefine the boundaries of the genres of memoir and creative nonfiction. His speakerly texts combine the voices of the working class of the Alabama foothills of Appalachia, his own voice as a member of this culture, and his narrative journalistic voice More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 17, 2009

Bonnie rated it:

There are books you read that not only make you grateful for what you have, but especially for what you haven't, or more correctly what you never thankfully experienced.

Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize Winner for news editorials, touches you to the bone and breaks your heart ever so silenty with his memoirs of growing up in poverty, alcoholism and abuse on account of the father, but love as you've never read on account of the mother.

This is not a rags to riches story but one of More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Oct 05, 2008

Anita rated it:

Rick Bragg is a gifted writer that brings about experience through his writing.

His authentic representation of the values of the South reflected those similar to explanations that my friend Stephanie shared. As a Yankee... it is good for me to understnad history and culture through the yes of those lived it and loved it.

His portrayal of his mother and her relentless effort to provide care and love for her sons is beautiful. It speaks to the indelible thread that connects More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Sep 08, 2007

Rachael rated it:

I read this after looking at it sitting on my then boyfriend's bookshelf for years, and never considered it. In a desperate fit of needing something to read, I picked it up, and it instantly became my favorite book ever. I don't think it still is--it was more a function of what I wanted at the time. But for a long time I thought that if people wanted to understand how I felt about my mom they'd just have to read this book.

His stories about working as a journalist are interesting too, More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 27, 2007

Peggy rated it:

I thought this was the best book that I had read in years. Rick Bragg simply tells the story of his life, his father, mother, and his brothers. It was not a happy life, but he's not complaining. It's more like a tribute to his mother, how she just kept going, through often horrible difficult times. Bragg is a journalist, and how he got into that field could have made a good book all by itself. While it's about a lot of difficult times, it's a beautifully written story that make your heart g More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 10, 2007

Cynthia rated it:

In the vein of Frank McCourt/Angela's Ashes, if you love a memoir about someone's horribly poor but proverbially rich childhood, and how they battled adversity to find fame and fortune, read this. If McCourt made you feel as if you were running through some Irish back alleys, Bragg makes you feel as if you've spent your life sitting ona creaky front porch swing in backwater Alabama.

I love Bragg's newspaper work (scandal, shmandal) and you can see from this book that half of being a More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 23, 2007

Alison rated it:

I am a Yankee (although I now live in the South), and this book darn near killed me. It made me cry just about every time I picked it up. I still get weepy just thinking about how his momma came to New York, or when she stood up to his daddy after pouring out his moonshine and said, "just don't hurt my teeth." Some may find Bragg's writing unbearably over-the-top in its aw-shucks Southernness, but if simple lines like that don't punch you in the gut, you could possibly be made of stone

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 23, 2009

Pat rated it:

Bragg is a good writer and can conjure up a sentiment and atmosphere, no problem. But I almost didn't finish the first half of the book, which was written entirely in folksy dialect--as he later says, rustic witticisms. That may well be his natural way of speaking, but I wonder if his own family reads this and thinks, yes, that sounds just like Rick, or if they, like me, think it's distracting to pack QUITE so much down home flavor into EVERY sentence. Having recently read Mark Twain's autobi More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 20, 2008

Lindsay rated it:

This is the autobiography of Rick Bragg, who grew up in northeastern Alabama. His family was extremely poor. Bragg's father was constantly drinking and he had a very bad temper. His father left the family numerous times, and Rick and his brother were left in the hands of Rick's mother. His mother worked extremely hard so that her sons would be provided for. The book talks about hoe Rick's mother went 18 years without a new dress just so her sons would have clothes for school.

The st More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 11, 2009

Cheryl rated it:

I loved this book! Even though it was a heavier read than 'Ava's Man', probably because 'Ava's Man' was a memoir about his family told in the second person since his grandfather died the year before he was born, and the author said, "For that I've never forgiven him."

This book was bitter/sweet memoir written with painful honesty and some of the hurts he wrote about had to have been almost too much to remember let alone write about...

I felt like I was reading the More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 26, 2008

Indra rated it:

In my opinion, this is everything a memoir should be. Tells the truth as he sees it, does not spare himself, pulls no punches, takes no prisoners, beautifully written. A new favorite author. Unsparing, poignant observations about class in America, then and now, resonate above and beyond his story and the story of his family. His momma deserved to be remembered and observed with this much clarity and love...his descriptions of his life, particularly while he was in Haiti, and his lies to his momm More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 02, 2009

Barbara rated it:

I can't wait to read more Rick Bragg. This was a true story about his upbringing in the rural South. His family was terribly poor, and some of the personal stories in the book really touched me. One in particular was about how his mother would sit down at the table with her three boys, and would not eat dinner until they had finished. She always said she wasn't hungry, but he later realized as an adult that she was making sure that there was plenty to feed her children, and only if they go More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 19, 2008

Kathy rated it:

I had a love-hate relationship with this book, and I have now divorced it about halfway through. He's a lovely storyteller, but I found his stories did several bad things for me:
- Reinforced all my negative stereotypes about southerners.
- Made me feel helpless in the face of class barriers, which no one in his book really overcame. Even him.
- Reminded me how much I dislike memoirs. He claims it is not a sob story, but the reality does not support his claim.

Now I can More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 17, 2011

Noelle rated it:

I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1950s and '60s. Poor white southerners moved to the area to work on the GM assembly line in Norwood. Local people referred to them as hillbillies and poor white trash. The kids from these families distinguished between themselves and the rest of us by discovering who was "briar" (pronounced brah-r)and who was not. The kids tended to drop out of school, marry young, had bad teeth, and were overtly prejudiced against black people. The women sport More...

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Aug 01, 2011

Joy rated it:

Wow! Did I ever enjoy every page of this book! The author writes a column in "Southern Living", so that's how I discovered him. He is totally Southern, growing up in N. Alabama, then living in St. Petersburg and Miami, New York, and now in New Orleans. The book highlights his love for his mother (who raised three sons after her husband left, "went 18 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 More...

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Sep 17, 2010

Ethan rated it:

This book was difficult to read. Not because of the descriptions of poverty, but because of the author. Bragg's bloated, melodramatic prose and the massive chip on his shoulder made this book a chore to read. What is the unholy attraction to one-line paragraphs? The godawful overwritten and pompous (humble beginnings, perhaps, but certainly not humble endings) narrative made me nauseous. The writing reminded me of Tuesdays With Morrie, another book that could have been decent if not for the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 06, 2010

Kirsti rated it:

Gorgeous biography/autobiography about a poor woman and the sons she raised. Some people criticized the author for writing a book about his mother that really was about him, but that didn't bother me. I would think that, since he was a journalist for so many years, it would be hard for Rick Bragg to write about himself.

"It might have been snowing before I stepped inside but I noticed it for the first time when I came out, little specks of white, murdered by the warmth of the sid More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 04, 2010

Jared rated it:

"All Over But the Shoutin'" begins and ends within the same small town. But within those fifteen miles is the journey of Rick Bragg's life. Bragg takes us from Southern poverty, describing the class distinction as "...on that other side are the people--the smiling, carefree people--who can just as easily look over into your side, and turn their face away. Only the oxygen is richer on your side. It has to be. Because your childhood burns away much, much faster." We trave More...

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Jul 26, 2009

Barbra rated it:

What a brilliant book this was - I really enjoyed it.

Back Cover Blurb:
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 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 runni More...

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May 19, 2011

Barbara rated it:

Memoirs can be a risky endeavor; too often the writer with a troubled childhood veers off into lurid expose, leaving the reader feeling as though he's walked in on an embarassing, and private, act. Bragg never does that. His descriptions of his youth in Alabama are vivid; you can clearly imagine being able to touch the living room walls from the middle of the room, quilts hung in place of doors, and stacks of clothing, taken in by his mother to be washed and ironed for pennies. You can just More...

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May 17, 2010

rachel rated it:

Literature of the American South has always been a favorite of mine. Flannery O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams -- not only is their work spiritually and emotionally complex, it's heady with a feeling of place. In the first quarter of this book, Rick Bragg replicates that feeling almost better than the classics. While all of the authors mentioned above capture the South in a way that feels real, none of them have made me feel so truthfully how alien the rural, poor Southern upb More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2009

Carol rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Jan 19, 2012

Darlene rated it:

I have been reading a lot of memoirs over the past few months and All Over but the Shoutin' is by far, the best I have read (and I've read a lot of good ones, by the way!). Journalist Rick Bragg takes us from his difficult childhood in Alabama... characterized by poverty and the abandonment by his very troubled alcoholic father to his early adult life as a reporter and eventually to his work at the New York Times for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.

It wasn't just Mr. Bragg's story or More...

7 comments like

Feb 06, 2012

Angie rated it:

It's possible that I should only give this book 4 stars. It's really well written and an enjoyable, touching read, but it's not a poetic masterpiece. With that said, I really loved this book. I cared for every person mentioned throughout. It felt like he was writing the stories of so many people I love. I've read other reviews where he's accused of a bit of arrogance, but for every swaggering comment, there's a paragraph of self-effacement. I fought back tears several times, but not due to sad, More...

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Aug 02, 2010

Mary rated it:

One of my favorite genres is the memoir and this one tops my list. You could say it is the Southern version of Angela's Ashes, written by a son in tribute to his mother.

Bragg is a "good ole boy" whose narrative voice is as thick and Southern as sweet tea. He and his two brothers grew up dirt poor in Alabama with a long suffering mother and a ne'er do well father. Rick is the brother who made good, becoming a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. But no matter where his sto More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 23, 2011

Snotchocheez rated it:

A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of Annie Proulx' "memoir" (er, whine session) "Bird Cloud", where I commented that after reading it, she'd be the very last person I'd care to meet in person. The very polar opposite of that book (and that author's life-of-privilege bitching and moaning) is the exuberantly triumphant, life-affirming "All Over But the Shoutin'". After reading this memoir, not only do I want to meet Rick Bragg (its author), I want to spend hours pic More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)