This book was painful for me to read, in some ways, because I grew up in north Alabama and this book chronicles the history of some of "my people". Parts of my family did move from working the cotton on other people's land, to working in the new factories that promised so much. Nonetheless, it ...
I've read several books by Rick Bragg & I've always enjoyed his writing. His family background makes him perfect to bring the family & area Jerry Lee grew up in to life. No doubt Jerry Lee is crazy, but Rick Bragg helps us understand how & why. Recommended to those who have an interest in the ...
In 2004, I (by happenstance, if not a strange, whimsical predestination) found myself uprooted from 35 years of stasis in Los Angeles, and replanted in semi-rural Northeast Alabama. Many of my friends and acquaintances back home (and, heck, most people I meet here) wonder why I'd do something th...
Rick Bragg would get five stars for telling a good story. The fact of the matter is he got the Pulitzer Prize for telling good stories. I even liked most of his stories, even the ones about alligators. But I actually give him three stars because I did often wish that he wouldn’t be such a good ol...
Around him the forests splintered, towns burned, and the dead lay uncollected in the snow. Overhead, above the smoke, B-29s blacked out the moon, and artillery shells the size of garbage cans screamed across the sky. But he slept, a good soldier, hungry, dirty, too exhausted to be very much afrai...
One was old, old as the Cross, and the other had aged only a few days in a gallon can. Both had the power to change men’s lives. On one side of the ditch, a packed-in, pleading faithful fell hard to their knees and called the Holy Ghost into their jerking bodies in unknown tongues. On the other s...
It is not much more complicated than that. Home for me has always been as much a matter of class as location. My home is not the comfortable South, not the big churches, or the country clubs, or the giant waterfront houses on the lakes or the columned mansions on the main drags. Home for me is no...