I want to be clear; I am not criticizing this book. There is no one else writing today that I enjoy reading more. This new work is different, and the reasons are clear, the Author almost states as much in his comments.

In his previous work he has written either about his own experiences from a child to the writer he is today, or he was writing his first hand accounts of events as he experienced them. In, "Ava's Man", he is relating a story of a man he never knew as told, by among others, his Mother and his Aunts. The result of his collecting and relating the stories of others requires he be faithful to what they share. This same requirement left him little space to write prose that is totally unique and his own. There were bits of the book where he would introduce an idea, or summarize a lifestyle or a manner of speaking, and the writing was pure Rick Bragg Poetry. But this was not the rule.

For me the following type of sentence is what makes Rick Bragg stand alone, "This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven". Call it prose, poetry or music; it is amazing use of the language.

He said that this book was requested by people who felt he left out his Mother's story. Readers wanted to know where this remarkable woman was from, and who were the Parents that brought her along. Mr. Bragg even states that this is "their" book, the result of people stopping him in Airports and book signings and telling him he shortchanged his Mama.

The previous two books were both works that I wished there were more than 5 stars to express the talent of this man. This book too is excellent, and well beyond what most writers will ever approach. It also is different, not flawed or weak, just different. Individual readers will decide whether this shade of Rick Bragg is one they like better or less.

I hope he is working on a dozen new books.


THE STORY OF A MAN - MAGNIFICENTLY TOLD   September 23, 2001
 33 out of 33 found this review helpful

Few can evoke an accurate image of the Deep South. Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg (All Over But The Shoutin') does more than evoke it, he paints it in bold Mondrian-like brush strokes and chiaroscuro. The time and place come alive before our delighted eyes.

"Ava's Man" is a very personal history, it's the story of Bragg's mother's childhood in the dirt poor Appalachian foothills during the Depression, and it's a tribute to her father, Charlie Bondrun, the grandfather Bragg knows only through stories and reminiscences.

Of this man the author writes, ".....if he ever was good at one thing on this earth, it was being a daddy." Charlie, the father of seven always hungry children, moved his family 29 times during the depression. He worked wherever he could - sometimes for pay, at other times for a side of bacon or a basket of fruit. The doctor who delivered his fourth daughter, Bragg's mother, was paid with a bottle of whiskey.

Charlie was not an educated man. His wife, Ava, read the paper to him every day so he would be informed. But, he was a clever man - could make a boat out of car hoods, and he played the banjo, and he could dance.

Most importantly, despite the hardships, the deprivation, he knew how to make his family know they were loved.

This is Ava's story, Charlie's story, and the story of a time in our history, magnificently told.


Another Work of Art!   August 28, 2001
 25 out of 25 found this review helpful

I fell in love with Rick Bragg's writing in All Over but the Shoutin' and didn't think he could ever surpass it. I was very wrong. I started Ava's Man yesterday afternoon and didn't stop till I was finished. With the story of his mother in Shoutin I learned how it was to grow up in the south with his mother, 3 brothers and an alcoholic father who was never around. I wondered at the time where his mother got her backbone from and in Ava's Man I found out. His maternal grandfather, Charles Bundrum, was a true man of the south. He raised 7 children during the depression with little or no money and he raised them all solid. He had to move his family 21 times to keep one step ahead of poverty. He worked where ever there was work and he made moonshine. He lived his life as a man and loved his family. Charles could have been an angry man but , he wasn't. He was a legend in his own time and I am so glad that Mr Bragg took the time to tell his story. This is a great piece of southeren literature with almost lyrical prose that will be very hard to forget.


AVA'S MAN HITS HOME   August 22, 2001
 17 out of 25 found this review helpful

As a native Californian whose debut novel is in its initial release, I found myself fascinated by Rick Bragg's AVA'S MAN. Bragg's book is a biography of his maternal grandmother--a man he never knew yet grew to love through his research. My fascination with Bragg's book began on largely personal terms. Bragg's story of his grandfather could have easily been a story about my grandfather. Charlie Bundrum was born early in the last century and lived a hardscrabble life in the South. My maternal grandfather was born at about the same time and lived his entire life in Alabama. Charlie fought the good fight, and he struggled valiantly against poverty. He never got too far from it, but he did the best he could. Married at 17, he supported his family and planted the roots from which future generations grew. Charlie died young--at age fifty. My grandfather died in his thirties. Both men were survived by remarkable Southern women. Charlie's daughter gave birth to Rick Bragg. My grandfather's depression-era orphaned daughter gave birth to me. Once I read AVA'S MAN, I acquired a knowledge of what my mother's life in her youth was possibly like, and I began to understand her lifelong reluctance to discuss it in detail with any of her California children.


soaring, compelling and inspiring addition to family memoir   February 17, 2002
 17 out of 17 found this review helpful

As impossible as it may seem, Rick Bragg's soaring, compelling and inspiring "Ava's Man," his account of the life and time of his maternal grandfather, eclipses "All Over but the Shoutin.'" I find it difficult to describe the impact this astounding memoir had on me; I can honestly tell you that I have never wept or laughed (often simultaneously) over the pages of a book as I did while reading "Ava's Man." This work contains more raw material on what life should mean to us and how to live that life than most undergraduate educations. Through handsomely crafted anecdotes, Bragg has constructed a unique homage -- to a person, place and time which have passed from the American scene. As we learn who Charlie Bundrum was, what motivated him and how deeply he influenced those who loved and respected him, we discover a genuine American archtype by which we can measure our own lives. A memoir Americans will treasure for decades to come, its author has now elevated himself to the highest level of our national letters.

The introduction and epilogue alone richly outline the Charlie Bundrum's essential qualities. A powerful roofer and talented distiller, an angry, violent man who desperately loved and protected his family, a fiercely resilient man who disdained societal restrictions, Charlie Bundrum would be painfully out of place in the modern South. "It is only when you compare him with today...that he seems larger than life. The difference between then and now is his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it."

Rick Bragg describes his grandfather as a man "whose wings never quite fit him." Charlie Bundrum took "giant steps in run-down boots" during the Great Depression, a time of genuine, near desperate want in the rural South. As a child, Bundrum grew up "in hateful poverty, fought it all his life and died with nothing but a family that worshiped him and a name that glows like new money." Though he moved his family over twenty times during the Depression, his influence on this loved ones was absolute. He was so beloved, so missed, "that the mere mention of his death would make [his grown daughters] cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky."

Rick Bragg's storytelling abilities and extraordinary character sketches draw the reader intimately into the Bundrum family circle. Bragg's metaphors, piquant, homey and authentic, lend a sense of poetry and size. For example, Charlie Bundrum's hands, "finger-crushing, freakishly strong" (he could "bend a ten-penny nail in his fingers"), and his forearms, "hard as fence posts," symbolize the man. The author's descriptive prose is so pure, so plain, so true, that in places "Ava's Man" emerges as this generation's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."

The physical setting of the memoir is the hill and river region of northern Alabama and Georgia. There Charles spent an impoverished youth under the supervision of his hard-bitten father, Jimmy Jim, a dominant man who once bit off a foe's finger during a free-for-all. From his father, Charles inherited fearlessness. "Too wild for church, too raggedy for the Kiwanis Club," Charles loved the untamed reaches of the Coosa River; "this was his place, even though he did not own enough of it to fill a snuffbox." As an adult, he lived by his own cardinal rule of fatherhood: "don't let nothin' happen" to the children. The grinding poverty of the Depression only sharpened his instincts; yet the privations of the time would result in the premature death of an infant daughter, the only time his family saw him "whipped" by circumstances.

No saint, the Charlie Bundrum we encounter also has a "hot, dark basement" where genuine anger lives. As a fighter, he hit hard, unrelentingly so and he taught his sons to do the same. He was a considerable drinker, downing a pint of his "likker" for every gallon he lovingly distilled. "His product was clean,pure and safe as Kool-Aid" at a time when others' hooch could kill you. He was a brawler with the law as well, giving and taking licks to officers capable of catching him.

It really doesn't matter where you turn in "Ava's Man;" Charlie Bundrum emerges larger than life. Despite his own family's poverty, he adopts Hootie -- a misshapen, lonely older man -- and protects him with a devotion that is part ferocity and part altruism. Charlies' courage is the stuff of myth; in Bragg's capable hands, Charlie's encounters with bull-headed or misguided adversaries embellish his daughter Margaret's assessment of him: "I knew nothing could ever hurt me with Daddy there. I knew he would never let it happen."

Though Charlie Bundrum is the focus of "Ava's Man," Rick Bragg's gifted writing sustains the narrative. The author's recounting of family tragedies, like the terrifying accidental burning of his mother when she was but a small child, is told with astonishing bluntness. Yet, his language is so profound, so direct, so genuine, so elementally true, that the stuff of the Bundrums' lives become transcendent, metaphorical, universal. "Ava's Man" may become one of the most vital books you will have read in your life.