This year the Kalamazoo Public Library community reading program, Reading Together, is focusing on a selection of
Rick Bragg’s memoirs,
All Over But the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man, and the recently published
The Prince of Frogtown. Readers may choose to read any one or more of the series, as all feature the same themes.
Reading Together book discussions and a wide variety of special events will take place in March and April of 2009. Author Bragg will visit Kalamazoo on April 14, 2009, during National Library Week to conclude this year’s program. For a list of events, resources, and other ways to participate, see
http://www.kpl.gov/reading-together/.
The
Kalamazoo College Library has copies of all three books, and they are also available for sale at the Kalamazoo College Bookstore. You may also obtain the books through
MeLCat.
Why Three Books?
Rick Bragg’s memoirs of home and childhood are related but not linear. They sufficiently connect so that readers could start with the newest book,
The Prince of Frogtown, then move on to one of the others. Here’s what readers can look forward to:
All Over But the Shoutin’
With colorful language and emotional honesty, Rick Bragg recounts a turbulent and poverty-stricken childhood in rural Alabama that gave rise to a career in journalism and a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. His book is a sensitive but never self-pitying look at the fruits of his alcoholic father’s abuse and abandonment of the family, and at his mother, who bore the brunt of the pain.
Ava’s Man
Bragg celebrates his mama’s daddy, Charlie Bundrum, a heroic figure whose life was symbolic of a people and way of life nearly gone today from the Southern landscape. An ode to his grandfather, but also a study of the history and culture of the rural South, richly seasoned with all-but-forgotten lore and language.
The Prince of Frogtown
This completes the cycle of Rick Bragg’s stories about his childhood. Bragg was convinced the last thing he wanted was to become a father. Now married and suddenly stepfather to a young boy, Bragg looks back to move forward. Through conversations with people who knew Bragg’s father, he builds a picture of who Charles Bragg really was, searching for shreds of goodness in him. Stories about his father alternate with chapters about the developing relationship with his stepson.
About Rick Bragg
Rick Bragg says he learned to tell stories by listening to the masters, the people of the foothills of the Appalachians. They talked, of the sadness, poverty, cruelty, kindness, hope, hopelessness, faith, anger and joy of their everyday lives, and painted pictures on the very haze of the early evening, when work faded into story-telling. Those stories are the backbone of all three of his memoirs.
Bragg was born in Alabama, grew up there, and worked at several newspapers before joining The New York Times in 1994. He covered the murder and unrest in Haiti while a metro reporter there, then wrote about the Oklahoma City bombing, the Jonesboro killings, the Susan Smith trial and more as a national correspondent based in Atlanta. He later became Miami Bureau Chief for the Times just in time for Elian Gonzalez's arrival and the international battle for the little boy.
Bragg received the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1996 while at The New York Times for his elegantly written stories about contemporary America. He has twice won the prestigious American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award, and more than 50 writing awards in his 20-year career. In 1992, he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. He has taught writing in colleges and in newspaper news rooms.
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