Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin'
) continues to mine his East Alabama family history for stories, this time focusing on the life of his alcoholic father. Unlike his previous two memoirs, Bragg merges his father's history of severe hardships and simple joys with a tale from the present: his own relationship with his 10-year-old stepson. Bragg crafts flowing sentences that vividly describe the southern Appalachian landscape and ways of life both old and new. The title comes from his father, who grew up in the mill village in Jacksonville, Ala., a dirt-poor neighborhood known as Frogtown, a place where they didn't bother to name the streets, but simply assigned letters. His father's story walks the line between humorous and heartbreaking, mixing tales of tipping over outhouses as a child and stealing an alligator from a roadside show in Florida with the stark tragedies of drunkenness, brawling, dog fighting, chain gangs, meanness and his early death from tuberculosis. Juxtaposed with vignettes about Bragg's stepson, this memoir has great perspective as the reader sees Bragg, the son of a dysfunctional father who grew up very poor, grapple with becoming the father of a modern-day mama's boy. This book, much like his previous two memoirs, is lush with narratives about manhood, fathers and sons, families and the changing face of the rural South. (May)
