All Over But the Shoutin' (Bragg) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love...that he will make you cry.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution


There's one thing for sure about the life story of New York Times national correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg, as he tells it in this angry memoir: He hasn't had it easy. All Over but the Shoutin' details a childhood spent dirt-poor and fatherless in Alabama, protected by a loving mother who sacrificed everything for her children. It's the story of a have-not, resentful of the haves, who overcomes crushing limitations to become a newspaper reporter and who eventually scrambles his way into a job at what he calls "the temple" of his profession, the New York Times. In the end he triumphs, buying his mother the decent house she's always wanted—with cash.

It's a tough story all right—too bad that from the first page you can hear Bragg, in the measured spit-and-polish prose newspapermen use when they're being sensitive, milking it for all it's worth. The novelist Lee Smith, and Dolly Parton (in a number like her "Coat of Many Colors"), understand the power of understatement when it comes to conveying the heartbreak of poverty, and that's what makes their work so rich. But Bragg's litany of major bummers reads like a bid for sympathy. It's as if he believes that piled-on layers of hardship and woe are likely to wrench that many more tears out of us, as if we should be wowed by the sheer bulk and weight of his experiences.

He recalls how his mother "scraped together money for my high school class ring, even though her toes poked out of her old sneakers and she was wearing clothes from the Salvation Army bin in the parking lot of the A&P. It was not real gold, that ring, just some kind of fake, shiny metal crowned with a lump of red glass, but I was proud of it ... If the sunlight caught it just right, it looked almost real." In case that reference to his mother's holey sneakers slips by you the first time, Bragg mentions them at least twice more during the course of the book.

What makes All Over but the Shoutin' truly annoying, though, are Bragg's rooster-size ego and his sanctimoniousness about his profession. Of course, all journalists have big egos -- it comes with the territory. And on some level, you can't blame Bragg for being proud that he was able to crack the stuffy establishment that is the New York Times. But after he's mentioned his numerous journalism awards for the third time, and after you've caught onto his trick of sprinkling down-home cracker words like "ain't" amid his crisp, crafty Times-style prose, the whole thing starts to smell like yesterday's catfish. Bragg tells how he got a promotion at one of his pre-Times newspaper jobs by purposely "overwriting" a story about a chicken that fought off a bobcat. "The moral, I suppose, was this: Do not, on purpose, write a bunch of overwritten crap if it looks so much like the overwritten crap you usually write that the editors think you have merely reached new heights in your craft." Bragg thinks he's making a funny at his own expense, but by the time you read those words, a good two-thirds of the way through the book, you may wonder if the joke is really on you.
Stephanie Zacharek - Salon


"A common condition of being poor white trash," explains New York Times correspondent Bragg on learning he won a Pulitzer Prize last year, is that "you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away." Having won that prize for stories about others, he tells his own here in a mixture of moving anecdotes and almost masochistic self-analysis. He brings alive his childhood of Southern poverty, his absentee father dead at 40, one brother scavenging coal for the family at nine, the other in and out of jail. Someone advised Bragg, "'[T]o tell a story right you have to lean the words against each other so that they don't all fall down," and his gift for language shines through every scene of violence and deprivation. If only he would let events speak for themselves, but all too often the tone falters and Bragg takes time out to excoriate some long-gone colleague and to pass out guilt badges. What saves this uneven, jolting narrative is his love and respect for his mother, who dragged him behind her as a toddler while she picked cotton in the fields. His ambition to buy her a house was realized last year: "'She never had a wedding ring, or a decent car, or even a set of furniture that matched. Or teeth that fit. But she had a home now... of her own."
Publishers Weekly


On Palm Sunday, 1994, a tornado ripped through a church in Piedmont, AL, killing 20 people. This is Bragg's hometown, and he began his story on the tragedy for the New York Times as follows: '"This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven. This is a place where the song 'Jesus Loves Me' has rocked generations to sleep, and heaven is not a concept, but a destination.' It is writing of this quality that won the author his job as a national correspondent and the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. He grew up in poverty, the second of three sons of an alcoholic, abusive father and a loving mother. The early chapters give a beautiful description of warm and happy moments he enjoyed with her and his family even as she struggled to provide for them after they'd been abandoned. Teens will enjoy reading about the resourceful, talented, and lucky young man's career as he moved from local reporter to working for regional and national papers. —Patricia Noonan, Prince William Public Library, VA.
School Library Journal


A celebrated Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter turns his investigative attention to his own past: growing up poor and making his way from rural Alabama to the top of his profession. Bragg, who was born in 1959, is poetic and convincing on his family's poverty and how it chipped away at their dreams "to the point that the hopelessness show[ed] through." His father, violent and an alcoholic, figures here, as do his siblings, but this is above all a son's story of love and respect for a mother who picked cotton, cleaned houses, and took in washing and ironing, determined to secure for her children the chance at a successful life that poverty had denied her. Bragg explores the ambivalence he felt about leaving home and his growing awareness that such choices will allow him to achieve at a level he's scarcely imagined. His labors lead eventually to a job at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and then to Harvard in 1992, when he receives a Nieman Fellowship that allows him to make up in reading and coursework some of what he'd missed by having left college early. Bragg won his Pulitzer in 1996 for his human interest stories, profiles of such figures as a courageous bodega owner, defying robbers, and of the 87-year-old Mississippi washerwoman who donated her life savings to a university. He realizes a long-cherished plan when he has enough money to buy a home for his mother. Says Bragg, "you do the best you can for the people...you love with all the strength in your body, once you finally figure out that they are who you are, and, in many ways, all there is. Bragg, who now lives in Atlanta, has a strong voice and a sweeping style that, like his approach tonewspaper writing, is rich, empathetic, and compelling. His memoir is a model of humility combined with pride in one's accomplishments.
Kirkus Reviews