All Over But the Shoutin'

2 cassettes / 3 hours
Read by the author

Now, this national bestseller is specially priced at $12.95

"This is a moving, memorable audio, the kind that stays in the listener's mind long after it ends." --Billboard

"Rick Bragg writes like a man on fire. And All Over But The Shoutin' is a work of art. While reading this book, I feel in love with Rick Bragg's mother, Margaret Bragg, a hundred times. I felt like I was reading one of the prophets in the Old Testament when reading parts of this book. I thought of Melville, I thought of Faulkner. Because I love the English language , I knew I was reading one of the best books I've ever read. By explaining his life to the world, Rick Bragg explained part of my life to me. You feel things in every line this man writes. His sentences bleed on you. I wept when the book ended. I never met Rick Bragg in my life, but I called him up and told him he'd written a masterpiece, and I sent flowers to his mother."--Pat Conroy

"A sort of Alabama version of Angela's Ashes, this memoir details the miserable, impoverished childhood that informed and inspired a young man who became a successful writer . . . . Throughout, Bragg's own vice barely contains his bitterness and rage." --Chicago Tribune


"Listening to myself read it aloud gave me the opportunity to hear my words in my own voice, not just in my mind. Reading the sad parts out loud brought tears to my eyes. It was a delightful experience, and I'm proud to have done it."
-Rick Bragg

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most.

But at the center of this soaring memoir is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone. Evoking these lives - and the country that shaped and nourished them - with artistry, honesty, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings hone the love and suffering that lie at the heart of every family.

The result is unforgettable.