Rick Bragg

In his first memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, Pulitzer-winning reporter Rick Bragg told of his mother’s triumphant struggle to raise three boys in the face of grinding poverty and an abusive, alcoholic husband. Ava’s Man , new to paperback, takes the story back a generation to chronicle his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a carpenter and moonshiner who lived a life of stubborn independence and fierce family devotion in the hardscrabble foothills of Alabama and Georgia during the worst years of the Great Depression. Bragg frankly admits that he sees Charlie, who died the year before Bragg was born, as the heroic father figure he never had. But Ava’s Man is no hagiography. It’s a complex portrait of a man of many failings redeemed by his strength, selflessness, and love. He was illiterate but not ignorant, an inveterate drunk who worked hour after backbreaking hour to feed his children, who brawled constantly with the police and faced down a homicidal, shotgun-wielding neighbor. Bragg vividly recreates a backwoods culture now paved under highways and drowned under dams. These are the hillbillies usually parodied as The Simpsons’ Cletus the Slackjawed Yokel or demonized as the crude inbreeds of Deliverance . Bragg doesn’t hide the trash but gives his folk their own rough country dignity. Barnes & Noble in Galleria, Edina, (952) 920-0633