Ava's Man

Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375413510
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression; a moonshiner who drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold; an unregenerate brawler, who could sit for hours with a baby in the crook of his arm. In telling Charlie’s story, Bragg conjures up the backwoods hamlets of Georgia and Alabama in the years when the roads were still dirt and real men never cussed in front of ladies. A masterly family chronicle and a human portrait so vivid you can smell the cornbread and whiskey, Ava’s Man is unforgettable.

Where I Come from

Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0593317785
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf"--Copyright page.

The Most They Ever Had

Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817356835
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Book Description
In spring of 2001, across the South, padlocks and logging chains bind the doors of silent mills, and it seems a miracle to blue-collar people in Jacksonville, Alabama, that their mill survived. In these real-life stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg brilliantly evokes the hardscrabble lives of those who lived and died by an American cotton mill.

The Best Cook in the World

Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400032695
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 562

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Part cookbook, part memoir, these “rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales” (USA Today) are the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s loving tribute to the South, his family and, especially, to his extraordinary mother. Here are irresistible stories and recipes from across generations. They come, skillet by skillet, from Bragg’s ancestors, from feasts and near famine, from funerals and celebrations, and from a thousand tales of family lore as rich and as sumptuous as the dishes they inspired. Deeply personal and unfailingly mouthwatering, The Best Cook in the World is a book to be savored.

All Over but the Shoutin'

Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307762912
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winner and bestselling author, "a grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... he will make you cry" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). 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 also 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.

My Southern Journey

Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Liberty Street
ISBN: 0848747151
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
From celebrated New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Rick Bragg, comes a poignant and wryly funny collection of essays on life in the south. Keenly observed and written with his insightful and deadpan sense of humor, he explores enduring Southern truths about home, place, spirit, table, and the regions' varied geographies, including his native Alabama, Cajun country, and the Gulf Coast. Everything is explored, from regional obsessions from college football and fishing, to mayonnaise and spoonbread, to the simple beauty of a fish on the hook. Collected from over a decade of his writing, with many never-before-published essays written specifically for this edition, My Southern Journey is an entertaining and engaging read, especially for Southerners (or feel Southern at heart) and anyone who appreciates great writing.

The Speckled Beauty

Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593081412
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin', the warmhearted and hilarious story of how his life was transformed by his love for a poorly behaved, half-blind stray dog. Speck is not a good boy. He is a terrible boy, a defiant, self-destructive, often malodorous boy, a grave robber and screen door moocher who spends his days playing chicken with the Fed Ex man, picking fights with thousand-pound livestock, and rolling in donkey manure, and his nights howling at the moon. He has been that way since the moment he appeared on the ridgeline behind Rick Bragg's house, a starved and half-dead creature, seventy-six pounds of wet hair and poor decisions. Speck arrived in Rick's life at a moment of looming uncertainty. A cancer diagnosis, chemo, kidney failure, and recurring pneumonia had left Rick lethargic and melancholy. Speck helped, and he is helping, still, when he is not peeing on the rose of Sharon. Written with Bragg's inimitable blend of tenderness and sorrow, humor and grit, The Speckled Beauty captures the extraordinary, sustaining devotion between two damaged creatures who need each other to heal.

Somebody Told Me

Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375725520
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
With his bestselling All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg gave us memorable stories of his own childhood. Here he offers the best of his work as a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist writing the remarkable stories of others. For twenty years, Bragg has focused his efforts on the common man. So while some of these stories are about people whose names we know—such as Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drowned her two sons—most are people whose names we've never heard, people who have survived tornadoes and swamps, racism and bombs. In incisive, unadorned prose that is nonetheless strikingly beautiful, these pieces rise above journalism to become literature and show the triumph of the human spirit.

The Replacements

Author: Jim Walsh
Publisher: Voyageur Press
ISBN: 1616739789
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Formed in a Minneapolis basement in 1979, the Replacements were a notorious rock ’n’ roll circus, renowned for self-sabotage, cartoon shtick, stubborn contrarianism, stage-fright, Dionysian benders, heart-on-sleeve songwriting, and—ultimately—critical and popular acclaim. While rock then and now is lousy with superficial stars and glossy entertainment, the Replacements were as warts-and-all “real” as it got. In the first book to take on the jumble of facts, fictions, and contradictions behind the Replacements, veteran Minneapolis music journalist Jim Walsh distills hundreds of hours of interviews with band members, their friends, families, fellow musicians, and fans into an absorbing oral history worthy of the scruffy quartet that many have branded the most influential band to emerge from the ’80s. Former manager Peter Jesperson, Paul Stark and Dave Ayers of Twin/Tone Records, Bob Mould and Grant Hart of rivals Hüsker Dü, the legendary Curtiss A, Soul Asylum’s Dan Murphy, Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, power-pop hero Alex Chilton, Craig Finn of The Hold Steady, and replacement Replacements Slim Dunlap and Steve Foley: all have something to say about the scene that spawned the band. These and dozens of others offer insights into the Replacement’s workings--and the band’s continuing influence more than fifteen years after their breakup. Illustrated with both rarely seen and classic photos, this, finally, is the rollicking story behind the turbulent and celebrated band that came on fast and furious and finally flamed out, chronicled by one eyewitness who was always at the periphery of the storm, and often at its eye. “[T]his consistently engaging and poignant work . . . . [is a] loving, appropriately ramshackle tribute to one of the most beloved rock-and-roll bands of the 1980s. . . . The band's story is an archetype of the joys and pitfalls of underground success.”--Publishers Weekly “The Replacements were superheroes: They rescued a whole planet from ’80s music. Jim Walsh’s loving, engrossing oral history is the book they deserve.”—Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity

Through the Groves

Author: Anne Hull
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1466805013
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
“Hypnotic and tender, this book reminds us that even if we leave our homes, our homes never leave us.” —Oprah Daily “[Hull] has that sly eye for sublime details, but also a killer instinct for tight storytelling.” —Carl Hiaasen, New York Times Book Review A richly evocative coming-of-age memoir set in the Florida orange groves of the 1960s by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father’s family had worked for generations. The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. “Look now,” her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. “It will all be gone.” But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations. All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in. She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter. As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape. Here, Hull captures it all—the smells and sounds of a disappearing way of life, the secret rituals and rhythms of a doomed family, the casual racism of the rural South in the 1960s, and the suffocating expectations placed on girls and women. Vividly atmospheric and haunting, Through the Groves will speak to anyone who’s ever left home to cut a path of their own.