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Summary
Summary
In this final volume of the beloved American saga that began withAll Over but the Shoutin'and continued withAva's Man,Rick Bragg closes his circle of family stories with an unforgettable tale about fathers and sons inspired by his own relationship with his ten-year-old stepson. He learns, right from the start, that a man who chases a woman with a child is like a dog who chases a car and wins. He discovers that he is unsuited to fatherhood, unsuited to fathering this boy in particular, a boy who does not know how to throw a punch and doesn't need to; a boy accustomed to love and affection rather than violence and neglect; in short, a boy wholly unlike the child Rick once was, and who longs for a relationship with Rick that Rick hasn't the first inkling of how to embark on. With the weight of this new boy tugging at his clothes, Rick sets out to understand his father, his son, and himself. The Prince of Frogtowndocuments a mesmerizing journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of Rick's youth, to Jacksonville's one-hundred-year-old mill, the town's blight and salvation; and to a troubled, charismatic hustler coming of age in its shadow, Rick's father, a man bound to bring harm even to those he truly loves. And the book documents the unexpected corollary to it, the marvelous journey of Rick's later life: a journey into fatherhood, and toward a child for whom he comes to feel a devotion that staggers him. With candor, insight, tremendous humor, and the remarkable gift for descriptive storytelling on which he made his name, Rick Bragg delivers a brilliant and moving rumination on the lives of boys and men, a poignant reflection on what it means to be a father and a son.
Author Notes
Rick Bragg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. A national correspondent for the "New York Times", he lives in Miami, Florida.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. In reading his latest autobiographical title, which alternates between the rough-and-tumble rural South of his origins and the contemporary suburban South of his preteen stepson, Bragg smoothly invokes colloquial pronunciations such as the dropping of the g sound in ing words. In the hands of any other narrator besides the author, such touches would seem stilted, but Bragg brings sincerity and dignity to the proceedings. He demonstrates a knack for building dramatic tension in presenting his narrative, holding back serious emotional fire for the most pivotal confrontations. One particularly memorable dialogue centers on his father's participation in the brutal sport of dog fighting and how one fateful act of alcohol-fueled desperation forever altered the family dynamic. In coming to terms with the cushy 21st-century existence of the boy, Bragg poignantly recounts a surprising exchange between his stepson and a less fortunate family at a roadside fast-food restaurant. As he straddles two contrasting identities, Bragg remains unafraid to demonstrate his vulnerability, and this nuanced performance perfectly matches the themes of his work. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 3). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Whereas All Over but the Shoutin' (1997) provided a tribute to his resilient mother and Ava's Man (2001) chronicled his remarkable grandfather, Bragg, an Old World storyteller at heart, now aims his sights squarely at his much-loathed father. In an Appalachian village where bootlegging and brawling took up whatever hours weren't owed to the cotton mill, the Bragg men drank corn whiskey, played poker, rolled dice and settled arguments with fists and knives and sometimes just acted a little peculiar. Perhaps doomed from the start, his father's life crawls, runs, and staggers from an impoverished and roughshod childhood to a young man's tomcatting golden age to the abuse, neglect, and early death of severe alcoholism. Bragg attempts to reconcile but not forgive his father and his legacy as he himself becomes a stepfather to exactly the sort of boy who ought never be a Bragg; who, to his horror, wept from a boo-boo, or if he was tired. As the boy grows into a man, Bragg transforms into the sort of father he always lacked, and believed he could never be. A deeply felt and painfully honest portrait of folk, family, and fatherhood that will resonate with bittersweet harmony as long as fathers have sons, and sons have fathers.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN June 1942, a United States naval convoy arrived in New Zealand, beginning a friendly invasion that would last two years and involve around 100,000 American soldiers and sailors. To help the visitors adapt, the New Zealand government published a booklet that made a useful point: "New Zealanders have been well trained by your movies," it said, "so we cotton (catch) on to most of your ordinary slang. But as we don't export films to Hollywood you won't know ours." That one-way flow of American culture has only gained momentum since then, which is why Christina Thompson's account of her own first visit to New Zealand strikes a jarring note. It's sometime in the 1980s, and Thompson has stopped off on her way from Boston, her hometown, to graduate school in Australia. In a pub north of Auckland she meets a group of Maoris - New Zealand's indigenous Polynesians - having a beer after a day out diving for crayfish. "I have often thought of that night as a contact encounter," she writes in "Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All," explaining that "'contact' is what we call it when two previously unacquainted groups meet for the very first time." Thompson persists with this meeting-of-alien-peoples theme as the tenuous link between the memoir part of her book, in which she is cast as a kind of explorer charting new cross-cultural territory in her relationship with a Maori ("I was small and blond, he was a 6-foot-2, 200-pound Polynesian. I had a Ph.D., he went to trade school"), and the history part (the European discovery and colonization of New Zealand). The late-20th-century pub incident, for example, segues into accounts of 18th-century encounters between Maoris and explorers like James Cook and Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne. Both of them were ultimately killed by the Polynesians they met; Thompson married hers. Later, the story of Omai, the first Polynesian to set foot in England, is woven into an account of Thompson's return home with her new husband, "for many people in Boston ... the first person they had ever met of his kind." In 1770s London, Omai was a hit - with one young lady asserting that "he is so polite, attentive & easy, that you would have thought he came from some foreign court." In modern-day Boston, Thompson's husband, known as Seven, attracted "a similar sort of admiration," something she found surprising. "He, after all, had little idea how things were done among people like my parents and could no more have been expected to know what passed for good manners among them than they would have known the protocol for being invited onto a Ngati Rehia marae." Really? I can see how middle-class Bostonians might not be steeped in the etiquette of the Maori meeting place, but there's been nowhere to hide from all things American - even in New Zealand - for quite a few decades now. The Maori chief Toot in his costume as a chieftain, circa 1818. From the Missionary Papers. We don't learn here of Omai's fate, though in her fine account of Captain Cook's voyages ("The Trial of the Cannibal Dog"), Anne Salmond rounds off his remarkable tale. After two years entertaining scientists and society ladies, Omai joined Cook's final South Pacific journey, eventually making it back to his home near Tahiti. There, he was set up with a house, a garden and a collection of animals including horses, sheep, turkeys, cats and a monkey. A few years later, though, Omai succumbed to a fever, all but one of his animals also having died, even the monkey, which was killed falling out of a coconut palm. As for Seven, at book's end he is still in Massachusetts, where the family settled and Thompson works as editor of Harvard Review. She wonders sometimes if he gets homesick. "'Don't you want to go back to New Zealand?' I would ask him. 'Not really,' he always said." Although Thompson's "contact encounter" parallels are strained, her observations about the enduring effects of colonization can be penetrating. She puts her vantage point of insider-outsider (she's never lived in New Zealand yet has an intimate connection with it) to good effect, tracing the genealogy of racial stereotypes and cutting through some of New Zealand's most cherished myths about itself. Like the one about how injustices of the past have been addressed, or that, unlike Australia, New Zealand is not racist. "What, after all, does the cluster of social indicators that includes low life expectancy, poor health, high unemployment and low levels of educational attainment suggest, if not poverty?" she asks. "And what is the root cause of Maori poverty, if not colonization?" Thompson now has interests on both sides of the postcolonial divide, feeling the dispossession suffered by her husband's (hence her children's) people as well as that perpetrated by her own. ("It was the Dakotas and Pennacooks and Pawtuckets who paid the price of our family's prosperity.") A difficulty with explorer stories, however, is that the voice of the explored is usually missing, and this is certainly the case here. Thompson explains it as a deliberate decision, a "gesture of respect." "It is not their story I am telling," she says of Seven's family, "it is mine." Actually, it is both - it's her story about herself and her story about them. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, lives in New Zealand.
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Bragg revisits his Alabama hometown for the third time, following All Over but the Shoutin' (1998) and Ava's Man (2002, both Vintage). He attempts to retell the story of his father, vilified as an abusive drunk in the earlier works, and gives him a more in-depth treatment in an effort to determine what made him the way he was. While by no means sympathetic, the portrayal shows readers a man who had limited choices in education, employment, relationships, and, ultimately, behavior. Before he became an absent father, Charles Bragg was a good son; a handsome man with a sexy car; a fighter and carouser, and eventually a mean, spiteful drunk. Described through recollections of friends and relatives who knew him when, the figure who emerges coped the only way he knew how, with exaggerated machismo, in a small town that he never left for any length of time. The author's realization that he might have been harsh in his previous memoirs comes through as he views his new 10-year-old stepson as soft. Even with all the benefits of education and a Pulitzer Prize, that seed of the immature Bragg tough guy remains. The story unfolds in alternating chapters, shorter ones about the stepson interspersed with longer ones about Charles Bragg. The stepson stories have a '40s-something navel-gazing quality about them that could put off some teens, but most of the book, masterfully told, is the kind of dysfunctional family memoir that teens tend to love.-Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Review
With this wrenching story of fathers and sons, Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg completes the personal saga he began with the best sellers All Over but the Shoutin' and Ava's Man. After 40 years of self-proclaimed bachelorhood, Bragg finds himself thrown into the uncomfortable and challenging position of becoming a stepfather. Learning to have a son brings to light the chasm separating Bragg from his own father. Readers are at last allowed to catch a glimpse of this passionate and clearly troubled alcoholic and Korean War veteran, dismissed in the earlier memoirs as a deadbeat villain. Abandoned by his father at age six, Bragg relies on accounts from his mother, brothers, cousins, and family friends to piece together his father's story, riddled with tales of white-whiskey bootlegging, run-ins with local law enforcement, and domestic disputes. Here, Bragg continues in the vein of his legendary storytelling, breathing life into a father he barely knew while learning to love a son. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/08.]--Erin E. Dorney, Rochester, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.