Ava's Man

Bragg at his very best. I chased lightning bugs around a few men like his grandpa Charlie when I was much younger, but their species is almost extinct from what I can tell. I'm glad Charlie has a grandson who could so eloquently capture him so future generations will have some chance to know his kind--even if it is only on paper. Make a fresh batch of biscuits and settle in for a terrific read.

As an amateur family historian I have a passion for finding the stories of our ancestors and using them to bring those people back to life. [author:Rick Bragg|31122], with this tribute to a grandfather he never met, has succeeded in doing this in a manner that far exceeds anything I could ever hope to do. Nobody in his family would tell him about Charlie Bundrum, his maternal grandfather. From what little they let slip from time to time, he knew that they weren't ashamed of him. It mystified Bragg that in a family of such prolific storytellers, everyone was profoundly mum on this one subject. He began to question everyone he knew about this mysterious grandfather or his and slowly came to realize that the sheer presence of this man was show more so powerful that his family still couldn't bear to think that he was gone decades after his passing. "What kind of man was this," Bragg wondered, "who was so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?

"A man like that...probably deserves a book."

And so began Bragg's efforts to resurrect his grandfather, an effort so successful that I, a reader with no connection to his family or the life and times he led, felt that I knew him intimately and at the end I, too, wept unashamedly for this man who left this earth about the time I was born. There is no better example of the family historian's art than this. Maybe it doesn't list all the dates that places where people were born and died but it raises the dead, and you cannot ask for anything more than that.

I once said that Rick Bragg was my favorite living southern author. After saying that, I paused and added that I wasn't even sure that the words favorite and living were all that necessary.

This book has my highest recommendation. show less

In this fine companion piece to “All Over But the Shoutin’,” Rick Bragg continues to explore the history and times of his family, this time concentrating on the grandfather who died before Bragg’s birth – “for which I will never forgive him.”

Charlie Bundrum was a descendant of French Hugenots, “men who had starved across the water, came to the foothills to farm, log hardwoods and pine, strip-mine granite, make whiskey, raise kids, hunt deer, breed hunting and fighting dogs, preach, curse and brawl.” And he himself did several of those things, with a determination and honesty and grit, looming large in the family history.

But “Ava’s Man” is the history of more than one family. It is the history of a region – the show more Georgia-Alabama border country – and of the hard times that just got harder during the Great Depression, which came early and stayed late in those piney-woods.

Always loving, always lyrical, even when describing fistfights, feuds, and occasional brushes with the law, “Ava’s Man” sings a uniquely American song; one whose chords will resonate with the reader long after the book is closed. show less

I fell in love with Rick Bragg's writing after reading All Over but the Shouting. In it the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist wrote about his childhood in the rural hills of Alabama. In Ava’s Man he takes readers back there to tell the story of Charlie, his grandfather.

From the first pages I was completely captivated. His style of writing clicks so beautifully for me. He's writing nonfiction, but he's doing in an in a way that weaves a beautiful tale of the depression era South. You feel like you're there on the riverbank next to Charlie setting trout lines.

We follow Charlie and his wife Ava and their many children from one tiny Alabama and Georgia town to another. You feel the heartbreak when a child is sick, you hammer nails into show more roofs in the southern heat, and you sip moonshine when the day is done. By the time you finish you have as much admiration for Bragg's grandfather as he did himself. Charlie was a different class of man. He raised a family not because it was his job, but because it was his passion and his love.

BOTTOM LINE: The incredible thing about Bragg’s work is that he makes an ordinary man extraordinary. He makes the reader fall in love with Charlie by unfolding his life through the eyes of his children and neighbors. Charlie was a legend in his community because he was a good man who everyone loved and in the hands of a talented writer that’s all the story you need.

“It didn’t strike the travelers as unusual to see such a large cemetery around such a tiny church, not everybody kneels, but everybody dies.” show less

If someone held a gun to my head and told me I had to choose between Rick Bragg and Pat Conroy as my favorite Southern writer, I would have to help pull the trigger because there is no way I could choose. I’ve read everything Conroy has written except the Conroy Cook Book, and I’ve read four or five Bragg books, all excellent. I’m not a Southerner (although I was born in the South), but I love the homespun stories Bragg tells in this book and in the others I’ve read by him. His writing is a cross between hillbilly simple and Pulitzer Prize crafty. Like Conroy, I really read Bragg for the writing, not so much for the stories. I’m a retired high school English teacher, and finding truly wonderful writing is so difficult these show more days that when I find it, I’m like a dog with a bone—I latch on and won’t let go. Rick Bragg, like Pat Conroy, is not a Southern treasure; he’s a national treasure. show less

After rediscovering my love for Harper Lee's 'To Kill A Mockingbird', I now have a keen craving for any literature, fact or fiction, that brings to life the history of the Deep South. The strong and eccentric characters, the lazy heat, delectable food and lyrical accents. Pulling up a list of recommendations here on Librarything, I wasn't really expecting to find another Mockingbird or Harper Lee, but by happy chance that's just what I got!

Rick Bragg's writing has the same colourful detail, warm nostalgia and dry wit of my favourite novel, and just like Harper Lee's masterpiece, the characters are lifelike and sympathetic because they are based on real people. 'Ava's Man' is a story of the Deep South (or the South that once was, during show more the Depression) and Bragg's own family history. Ava's man is his grandfather, the handsome man on the cover but also the rail thin figure in overalls on the flyleaf, holding an oversized catfish by the mouth. The author never got to meet his fabled grandfather, his mother's father, for which he claims he will never forgive him. After spending a whole day jotting down reminiscences at a family reunion in Alabama, this is the real man that Rick Bragg got to know posthumously - 'since I never really had a grandfather, I decided to make me one'.

Charlie and Ava's life, and just the fact that they survived with seven of their eight children, is incredible. It sounds like a cliche now, but Charlie really was just a working man, a roofer who ran a still as a sideline, and Ava was his tough and voluble wife, who would sit by and make sure her children ate first before feeding herself. They moved back and forth between Alabama and Georgia many times before Charlie finally died in Alabama, and that is where most of the family settled and stayed afterwards. There is humour in their history - from the various strays that Charlie would 'adopt' to the beating that Ava once gave a woman named Blackie Lee for hanging her silk stockings on the line - and also sadness, but always a sense of family, love and security.

Rick Bragg spins a personal yarn about his beloved grandather, who rightly deserves a book, but likker, commodity cheese and cornbread aside, this could be about any family who stayed together and set down roots for generation after generation to call home.

If this is the 'good part' that Rick Bragg missed from his first book, I'm definitely going to have to read 'Shoutin' to fill in the blanks. Beautiful. show less

In Ava's Man Rick Bragg has written a unique tribute to his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a man he never knew but one he learned about through the stories of others. Bragg introduces us to Charlie through the carefully written anecdotes he has collected from those who knew Charlie personally. Charlie was a husband, father, roofer, and bootlegger. He was a man who lived by his own personal code in a specific area and place in time.

Charlie Bundrum was "so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them [his grown daughters] cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky."(pg. 9) "He grew up in hateful poverty, fought it all his life and died with nothing but a family that worshiped him and a name show more that gleams like new money." (pg. 12) Bragg said that he wrote this book in response to those who told him that he "short-shrifted them in the first book, especially about Charlie, about Ava, about their children" (pg.13) After Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin' readers wanted to know more about the people who were his mother's parents.

In this tribute to his grandfather, Bragg has crafted an amazing, descriptive portrait of his grandfather, a man who lived in crushing poverty during the Depression. He protected his children at all costs. He liked to drink the "likker" he distilled, yet he was a drinker who would laugh rather than get angry. "Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. 'And a man who'll lie,' he said, even back then, 'will steal.' " (pg. 53)

This biography of Charlie Bundrum is a truly amazing tribute. Bragg's use of language clearly evokes the time and place as well as establishing the characters. This is a memoir that could have become maudlin, but I really think that the quality of Bragg's writing sustains the narrative and elevates it above the ordinary. This is a genuine, honest, portrait of the grandfather Bragg never knew except through the stories of others and a book that should be treasured for generations to come.

Very Highly Recommended - one of the best; http://shetreadssoftly.blogspot.com/ show less