Search - All Over But the Shoutin'

This was good, but I was a little disappointed. I think a friend of mine (Joanne) hit the nail on the head -- I expected less of the good old boy writing/speech. I just expected more from a Pulitzer Prize winner. I thought the story was good, but it dragged in places and there were several places that I just didn't care, some of it, I felt was very self-serving and overly indulgent. Worth a read, but if I do read the next one from this writer, it will be a while. I couldn't handle them back-to-back I think :)

A deeply personal story about a boy cleaving from his salt-of-the-earth mother. Bragg, an award-winning writer, shows us extraordinary worlds in the deep south, the caribbean and within his own heart.

I really enjoyed this book. I guess if you would like to feel from the poor south this would be a good read. It is also encouragging that it's important to fight for and stick too something you really want. Sometimes our heart leads our heads and families do have a way of holding on to us. You will feel good when you finish the story.

I absolutely adore Rick Bragg's Southern Journal stories in Southern Living magazine. However, this book just goes on and on about how his childhood included a no-good father and a fabulous mother. I'm so glad that he has a wonderful mother but somehow it just doesn't seem to make a novel. His short stories are much more interesting reading. It's OK but not great.

As a Southerner, I LOVED this book. It was like coming home to read so many of the descriptions, I knew these people he talked about! Bragg does an excellent job of weaving his past with the present. Although I have read his other books, this one is the best.

Bragg's memoir covers much the same kind of territory Frank McCourt explored in "Angela's Ashes" -- a grim childhood marked by a drunken, often-absent father and a mother who struggled as best she could to make a life for her children, this one set in Alabama rather than Ireland. Like McCourt, Bragg writes so beautifully that the reader is able to get past the worst of the ugliness.