The Prince of Frogtown

I'm not saying that Rick Bragg is the only person who could have read his memoir, but he brings an intimacy and emotion to the work that another narrator would be hard-pressed to match. In addition, he's an accomplished raconteur. He offers up just enough of his native Alabama accent to give the work flavor but not so much that he can't be easily understood north of the Mason-Dixon line. His writing style is eminently listenable. He fills it with colorful metaphors, such as "It was a time when if you had a tattoo, you'd better be a Marine, and if you wore an earring, you'd better be a pirate." This is the kind of book you not only don't want to turn off at the end of a disc, you don't want the book itself to end. R.C.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 3, 2008
Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin'
) continues to mine his East Alabama family history for stories, this time focusing on the life of his alcoholic father. Unlike his previous two memoirs, Bragg merges his father's history of severe hardships and simple joys with a tale from the present: his own relationship with his 10-year-old stepson. Bragg crafts flowing sentences that vividly describe the southern Appalachian landscape and ways of life both old and new. The title comes from his father, who grew up in the mill village in Jacksonville, Ala., a dirt-poor neighborhood known as Frogtown, a place where they didn't bother to name the streets, but simply assigned letters. His father's story walks the line between humorous and heartbreaking, mixing tales of tipping over outhouses as a child and stealing an alligator from a roadside show in Florida with the stark tragedies of drunkenness, brawling, dog fighting, chain gangs, meanness and his early death from tuberculosis. Juxtaposed with vignettes about Bragg's stepson, this memoir has great perspective as the reader sees Bragg, the son of a dysfunctional father who grew up very poor, grapple with becoming the father of a modern-day mama's boy. This book, much like his previous two memoirs, is lush with narratives about manhood, fathers and sons, families and the changing face of the rural South.