Rick Bragg

The third and final volume of Bragg's ancestral memoir may be the best of the lot. Here he re-evaluates his father, who, he admits, he gave short shrift in his previous two volumes, All Over but the Shoutin' and Ava's Man. What he finds is a more complicated character than the neglectful drunk he once dismissed in favor of his mother's quiet, honorable strength. The change came, he says, when he married and inherited a 10-year-old stepson. The book volleys back and forth from tales of Bragg's father as a mischievous child, wild teenager and troubled adult to stories from the present, of Bragg reckoning with the coddled child, whose upbringing presents a difficult contrast to his own rough-and-tumble boyhood. The result is a wonderful story of boys and men, fathers and sons, the old and new South — replete with Bragg's characteristic gift for language, memory and soul.

Signed first editions.