Ava's Man | 
 enlarge | Author: Rick Bragg
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  66 reviews
Sales Rank: 16981
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0375724443
Dewey Decimal Number: 975.042092
EAN: 9780375724442
ASIN: 0375724443
Publication Date: August 13, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com's Best of 2001
The same fierce pride and love that animated All Over but the Shoutin' glow in Rick Bragg's new book. In fact, he informs us in the prologue that it was the readers of his bestselling 1997 memoir about his mother's struggle to raise three sons out of dire poverty who told him what he had to write about next. "People asked me where I believed my own momma's heart and backbone came from ... they said I short-shrifted them in the first book." Bragg sets out to make amends in this heartfelt biography of his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, who with wife Ava nurtured seven children through hard times that never seemed to ease in rural Alabama and Georgia. "He was a tall, bone-thin man who worked with nails in his teeth and a roofing hatchet in a fist as hard as Augusta brick," writes Bragg, "who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name." Charlie's children adored him so much that 40 years after his premature death in 1958 at age 51, Bragg's elderly aunts and mother began to cry when asked about him. Chronicling Charlie's hardscrabble life in the flinty, expressive cadences of working-class Southern speech, Bragg depicts a rugged individual who would find no place in the homogenized New South. The marvelous stories collected from various relatives--Charlie facing down a truckload of mean drunks with a hammer, hatchet, and 12-gauge shotgun, or brewing illegal white whiskey in the woods ("He never sold a sip that he did not test with his own liver")--are not just snapshots of a colorful character. They're also the author's tribute to an oral culture with tenacious roots and powerful significance in the American South. --Wendy Smith
Product Description
With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a national bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression; a moonshiner who drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold; an unregenerate brawler, who could sit for hours with a baby in the crook of his arm.
In telling Charlie’s story, Bragg conjures up the backwoods hamlets of Georgia and Alabama in the years when the roads were still dirt and real men never cussed in front of ladies. A masterly family chronicle and a human portrait so vivid you can smell the cornbread and whiskey, Ava’s Man is unforgettable.
Download Description
Rick Bragg brings his astonishing gift for storytelling to the tale of his grandfather, a man who kept his family one step ahead of poverty and starvation. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a bootlegger, and a fisherman. He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have overlooked. A portrait of an ineradicably memorable figure in a singular time, a moving reflection on home and family and on the author's own connection to a lost stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border -- Ava's Man is Rick Bragg at his stunning best.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 61 more reviews...
 Ava's Man important in the trilogy of Rick Bragg's ancestry. June 11, 2008
If chronological order is important to you, Ava's Man should be read as the first in the series of Rick Bragg's three biographical novels. Charlie Bundrum's story is the first of what we will learn is two family's lives in the rural south during turbulent times. Then, as now, when life is hard people find many different ways to survive. Generations later, we have the luxury of looking back with a critical eye. That's easy. When you're cold and hungry, the view is different.
In this book, Bragg shares with us the life to Charlie Bundrum who, along with Ava manages to rear a house full of children who survive with him and sometimes without him. One of those children is Margaret, Bragg's mother. Hard working and hard living, Charlie did all he knew to do to get by.
More than in either of the other two books in Bragg's trilogy of his family, Ava's Man tells us more about the history of region, industry, and the impact of war, all of which contribute to the making of the man, Charlie Bundrum.
While Bragg writes, he always manages to let the characters tell the story...in their own words. That language, and the crafting of the true tale he tells, leaves this "their story." On the other hand, Bragg's own turn of a phrase is "my language," that upon which I was reared. And is that which makes me feel like going home.
Ava's Man May 4, 2008
I have read all of Rick Braggs books and thia was the best. I felt like I just wanted to keep on reading. He is such a powerful writer. I just wish he had more books out there, but the ones he has written are the best. You will not be disappointed reading any of his books. There is no wondering why he is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
 A Southern family's life in poverty. April 26, 2008
I have only read one other book from this author (about Jessica Lynch). This is a very personal story of the author's grandfather who died an early death before Bragg was born. It is heartfelt because the author describes both the qualities and faults of his granddad. His grandpa liked homemade corn mash moonshine and sometimes was dead drunk when he came home. However, he provided a loving family life for his wife, sons, daughters, and grandkids. This man set a certain morality to how he lived and died. His was a small tragedy that he never lived to see how famous one of his grandchildren became.
Along with his grandfather's life, one also discovers the hardships of life in the depression era South. People who lived in the country did not go hungry if they knew how to hunt and fish. However this family was frequently evicted or moved from their rented home. This is a nice little story about a true family.
Spiders in her Voice December 9, 2007
I've never much cottoned to white male Southern writers, not even to Mr. Faulkner. They too often seem swollen, full of machismo, overly conscious of their Great Literary Tradition. But not Rick Bragg. Bragg is a real story teller without all the Southern Writer baggage.
Take his Ava's Man. That man is Bragg's grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, dead before Bragg was born but still living inside people who knew him. Using their memories, Bragg rebuilds his grandfather's life and the life of the woman who loved him, Ava.
I cherish Bragg's book for four reasons:
1) It's well-paced, written in short chapters that often left me with a swift intake of breath.
2) It has marvelous characters, vividly drawn. My favorite minor character is Hootie. Bragg writes, "He had a face like a pickax. His nose was long and hooked, and pointy on the end, like he had bought it at the Dollar Store and tied it on his face with a string, and it curved all the way down past his lips."
3) Bragg has a instinct for apt comparisons, often as striking as these:
of Bragg's great-granddaddy: "[He] moved like a shadow through the forest, his hobnailed boots soft as velvet slippers in the dry leaves."
of his ancestors: "they grew in [that culture] the way a weed grows in a crack."
and my favorite, of Ava: "there were spiders and broken glass in her voice."
4) To top it off, Bragg writes with clarity and compassion about his grandparents and their world. This book features Brundum, Ava's man, but it also paints a glowing picture of Ava who is just about as feisty as they come.
Read Ava's Man. You'll like it.
Marilyn Coffey is an award-winning writer of poetry and a widely published author of prose. Read her work: Great Plains Patchwork, Marcella, or KANSAS QUARTERLY Vol. 15 No. 2.
Was hard to put this one down November 24, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Rick Bragg has done a great job in telling it exactly, and I mean EXACTLY like it was in the South in the 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's. He takes a seemingly insignificant character- an illiterate carpenter, roofer and moonshiner- and brings out the full flavor of the man.
Laughs? Plenty. Like coming home drunk on his mule, trying to get the mule to rear back like Tom Mix's saddle horse, but instead having the mule dump him off on his head. Heartache? Having to bury an infant daughter because there was no money for medicine- let alone doctors. Character development? No shortage at all.
The book slowly hooked me, and I just couldn't put it down. His staying one step ahead of the "revenue men" (who never did catch him), his trying to find steady work to support his large family, the descriptions of the kids growing up in a series of small houses with no electricity, and all in all, the pure fun in a man who loved to entertain.
If you can, get the audio book version of this excellent book- Rick reads it himself. "It don't get no better than this."
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