1001 Books for Every Mood - Readers Guide

All over but the Shouting by Rick Bragg

In this memoir of a hardscrabble youth, a poor s outhern white boy pays tribute to his mother who picked cotton and cleaned houses to keep her children fed. Bragg recalls, “Of all the lessons my mother tried to teach me, the most important was that every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.” This book will have between the sobs.

-- 1001 Books for Every Mood

Readers Guide by Glenda York

Overview

Rick Bragg’s mother went 18 years without buying a new dress so that her sons could have decent school clothes. She also worked hard for other people doing menial labor so her children wouldn’t have to live on welfare. In short, she was the typical self-sacrificing mother who usually gets little recognition in this life. But Rick Bragg’s beautiful lyrical writing pays her apt tribute in this emotional memoir about growing up dirt poor in rural Alabama. Rick’s father was a hard drinking man with a murderous temper who habitually left the people who needed him most. But the lovely woman at the center of Rick’s tale is his mother. And this book stands as a testament to the power of his mother and what she tried to teach him.

Rick’s writing has been compared to Faulkner and other giants of southern writing, and justifiably so. His writing is poignant, revealing, poetic, heart wrenching, passionate, literate, and picturesque. He is a gifted storyteller who may have suffered monetary poverty in his growing up years, but was richly blessed with a wealth of spirit and devotion to family (his mother, in particular) that is astonishing.

This book follows the trajectory of Rick’s life from his boyhood in northeastern Alabama, through a stint at Harvard, his career at the New York Times, a stay in Haiti, and ultimately to his winning of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996 at the age of 36 (the highest honor his profession bestows). You certainly don’t have to be southern or even have an affinity for southern writing to enjoy this book. Rick’s appeal is universal because struggle is universal as well as emotional experiences and the search for forgiveness. These feelings transcend region or area and tap into those things basic to our humanity..

Discussion Questions

1. Bragg describes his hometown of Piedmont, Alabama as "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.” Do you think this quote captures the essence of the South?

2. Bragg says “White people had it hard and black people had it harder than that, because what are the table scraps of nothing?” Do you think his description of white and black relations in the South at that time was accurate?

3. Bragg mentions faith as being an important part of his momma’s life and that faith made the unbearable somehow bearable for her. How do you think this contributed to Bragg’s own struggle to understand, believe, and accept, that consumed so much of his childhood?

4. Discuss the relationship between Bragg and the rest of his family, particularly his younger brother Mark and older brother Sam.

5. Do you think Bragg’s characterization of the way society treats the poor is an accurate one? Why or why not?

6. Do you think Bragg’s idealization of his mother was overdone (not accepting of enough flaws), or fairly balanced?

7. Do you think Bragg’s poor background helped or hurt him in covering other cultures he reported on while writing for the New York Times?

8. For her entire life, Bragg’s mother lived in other people’s houses. Do you think that his being able to buy his mother a house and pay for it in cash made him feel like he was finally able to even out some of the slights she had experienced in her life and on his behalf?

About the Author

Rick Bragg is an American journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996 for his work with the New York Times. He has said 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. These stories form the framework for his books about his family: All Over But the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man, and Prince of Frogtown. He has also written Somebody Told Me: the Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg, and I am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story.

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Glenda York

Glenda York is a Librarian and Assistant Director at the Russell County Public Library in Jamestown Kentucky. She writes Glenda’s Picks, her monthly book suggestions for the KET Bookclub Newsletter, and maintains a book blog at http://www.readandlead.blogspot.com/.She also writes a Check It Out column for the local newspapers in the Jamestown/Russell Springs area. She is a member of a local book club called "The Porch Page Turners" (so named because they meet in a local Restaurant called "the Porch"). She is also a member of the Shadow-Scribes literary society. Books are her passion and her livelihood. She has been married for 39 years with one son.

Glenda's tagline:

"Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?"
...Neil Gaiman -- The Sandman ( Line spoken by Lucien, Librarian of the Dreaming)