Ava's Man (Hardcover)

by Rick Bragg (Author) "Ava met him at a box-lunch auction outside Gadsden, Alabama, when she was barely fifteen, when a skinny boy in freshly washed overalls stepped from..." (more)
Key Phrases: whiskey man, Charlie Bundrum, Cove Road, Congregational Holiness (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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

From Publishers Weekly
Following up his bestselling memoir, All Over But the Shoutin', Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bragg again creates a soulful, poignant portrait of working-class Southern life by looking deep into his own family history. This new volume recounts the life of his maternal grand father, Charlie Bundrum, who died in 1958, one year before Rick was born. Lacking a grandfather, the New York Times reporter sets out to build one "from dirt level, using half-forgotten sayings, half-remembered stories and a few yellowed, brittle, black-and-white photographs."His investigations in the Appalachian foothills along the Georgia-Alabama border turn up a beloved, larger-than-life rambler who inspired backwoods legend among contemporaries, undying devotion from his wife, Ava, and unabashed love and awe from his large extended family. Big-hearted but flawed, Bundrum was a man of contradiction. Genuinely devoted to his wife and children, he was a tenuous provider (a roofer by trade, he also cooked and frequently tasted his own moonshine) who fiercely defended his clan from trouble and hardship even as he occasionally brought it on them. He lived by a code of country justice that tolerated brawling with lawmen but disdained bullying, distinguished "good, solid biblical cursing" from mere "ugly talk," and forswore spitting in the presence of ladies.Bragg strives for an unvarnished portrait and succeeds, mostly balancing tremendous affection for his grandfather with the recognition that Bundrum, the last of his kind and a connection to a culture of backwoods self-sufficiency long dead in the South, deserves and would demand an honest rendering. "He is so much more precious smelling of hot cornbread and whiskey than milk and honey," Bragg writes. "The one thing I am dead sure of is that his ghost... would have haunted me forever if I had whitewashed him." A man like that, he concludes, "would, surely, want a legacy with some pepper on it."Bragg delivers, with deep affection, fierce familial pride, and keen, vivid prose that's as sharp and bone-bright as a butcher knife. In this pungent paean to his grandfather, Bragg also chronicles a vanished South that like the once-wild Coosa River Charlie liked to ply in homemade boats is becoming too tamed to accommodate those who would carve out a proud if hardscrabble living on its margins. (Sept.) Forecast: Knopf is pulling out all the stops for this; know they've got a winner: 200,000-copy first printing, 19-city author tour, and a nine-copy floor display including audio and large-print editions, and paperback copies of All Over but the Shoutin'.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition Stated edition (August 21, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375410627
• ISBN-13: 978-0375410628
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #447,839 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE STORY OF A MAN - MAGNIFICENTLY TOLD, September 23, 2001

By	Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Work of Art!, August 27, 2001

By	Paula Hess (Iowa United States) - See all my reviews

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.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading Doesnt Get Much Better, August 20, 2001

By	taking a rest - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

And if reading does indeed improve there is a high probability that Rick Bragg will write it. His first book, "All Over But The Shoutin", was a remarkable book and was recognized as such. And when a group of his stories were collected for, "Somebody Told Me", it contained shorter works that can stand with any that have appeared, whether fiction or non-fiction. I don't understand why this new work, "Ava's Man" is touted as a continuation of his first book. It is true the work expands on the history of his Family, but it is more of a prequel, exploring his Grandfather, Rick's Mother, and her Sisters. The distinction is important, for if you are expecting part two of Shoutin, which is not what you will get.

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.