Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

I read this entire book in O'Hare Airport in two days. Yeah because I live in an airport. You've seen the movie "The Terminal"?

So anyway, this book is a biography of Rick Bragg's grandfather, who he never met. He was close with his grandmother Ava, and he pieced together the bio based on accounts of his relatives and friends of his grandfather.

Its sort of a typical "My family is from the parts of Georgia and Alabama you ain't never seen" book with all the necessary themes of pride and family and stickin' it to the man and whatnot. There are tales of the horrors of the Depression and how there is a generation that couldn't ever cope with technology.

I enjoyed the story, it was less self-righteous than you'd expect. The downfall was the style- there's a clear goal with the anecdotal passages, but Bragg completely fails to bring it together. In a lot of cases there are just two or three paragraphs paraphrasing a specific story, but they aren't integrated into the plot, they just stand alone. I feel it could have been 5 stars if Bragg hired a better editor and spent about 3 years working on the execution.

Still if you like stories about country folks in the south, complete with stories of fleeing the cops and brewing whiskey in the woods, you'll probably really like this book. Plus it can be read cover to cover during a bad delay.