Ava's Man

Family Trilogy #2

by Rick Bragg

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of All Over But the Shoutin' continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother's childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her.

Rick Bragg brings his astonishing gift for storytelling to the tale of his grandfather, a man who kept his family one step ahead of poverty and starvation during the decade of the Great Depression. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a bootlegger, and a fisherman. He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have overlooked.

A portrait of an ineradicable, memorable figure in a singular time, a moving reflection on home and family and on the author's own connection to a lost stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border—AVA'S MAN is Rick Bragg at his stunning best.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Southern, History, Biography Memoir, Book Club

400 pages, Hardcover

First published August 21, 2001

About the author

Rick Bragg is the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of best-selling and critically acclaimed books on the people of the foothills of the Appalachians, All Over but the Shoutin, Ava's Man, and The Prince of Frogtown.

Bragg, a native of Calhoun County, Alabama, calls these books the proudest examples of his writing life, what historians and critics have described as heart-breaking anthems of people usually written about only in fiction or cliches. They chronicle the lives of his family cotton pickers, mill workers, whiskey makers, long sufferers, and fist fighters. Bragg, who has written for the numerous magazines, ranging from Sports Illustrated to Food & Wine, was a newspaper writer for two decades, covering high school football for the Jacksonville News, and militant Islamic fundamentalism for The New York Times.

He has won more than 50 significant writing awards, in books and journalism, including, twice, the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993, and is, truthfully, still a freshman at Jacksonville State University. Bragg is currently Professor of Writing in the Journalism Department at the University of Alabama, and lives in Tuscaloosa with his wife, Dianne, a doctoral student there, and his stepson, Jake. His only real hobby is fishing, but he is the worst fisherman in his family line.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars


Rick Bragg

Rick Bragg's grandfather Charlie Bundrum would probably be surprised to learn that his grandson grew up to be a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Charlie himself couldn't read, though he always asked his wife Ava to read him the newspaper so he wouldn't be ignorant.

Charlie died before Bragg was born, so the author never knew his grandfather and only heard snippets about him from other people. When Bragg - who'd already penned several books about his southern family - decided to write a book about Charlie, he asked his relatives to tell him stories about the man.


Rick and his mother

Most of them grew tearful remembering. "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?"

Charlie Bundrum was born in 1908 near the Alabama-Georgia border. He was a roofer by trade, but was also a whiskey-maker, sawmill hand, well-digger, hunter, poacher, and river man. Charlie - who was what women call "a purty man" - was tall and thin and "worked with nails in his teeth and a roofing hatchet in a fist as hard as Augusta brick."


Charlie Bundrum

Charlie made a boat out of two car hoods welded together, caught washtubs full of catfish, cooked white whiskey in the pines, and drank his own product. He played the banjo and guitar, and sang, laughed, and buck-danced under the stars.


Picture of man buck-dancing

Charlie was tender hearted, loved babies, and took a simple-minded man into his home to protect him from thugs. Charlie was normally a quiet man, but when the spirit or the liquor moved him, Charlie was a great storyteller. Charlie didn't go to church, and lived by his own moral code. And Charlie inspired backwoods legend and loyalty.

Bragg decided to tell Charlie's story for many reasons, one above all others - "to give one more glimpse into a vanishing culture." Charlie was the descendant of a French Huguenot man called Jean Pierre Bondurant. Religious persecution drove Jean Pierre to the New World, and he landed in Virginia in 1700. Over time, Jean Pierre's children and grandchildren drifted south, their name morphing into Bundrum along the way.

The Bundrums settled on both sides of the Alabama-Georgia line, and were among the first white settlers in the Appalachian foothills.


White settlers in the Appalachian foothills

They were farmers; they raised their children on deer meat, salt pork, and hoecakes; and they pushed ever deeper into the forest.


hoecakes

There were few slaves here, "so the whites did the heavy lifting." This is the world Charlie was born into near the turn of the century.

Charlie's mother told him stories and his father taught him how to brawl and how to live in the woods. Charlie's daddy showed him how to hunt deer; how to run a trotline to catch fish; how to tend a still; and how to watch out for government revenuers.


Trotline

Charlie learned well. He was the nemesis of law enforcement; beat up men who done him or his family wrong; and hunted out of season to feed his babies.

Bragg notes that Charlie was "blessed with that beautiful, selective morality that we Southerners are famous for. Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. He saw no reason to obey some laws, like the ones about licenses, fees, and other governmental annoyances, but he would not have picked an apple off another man's ground and eaten it." On the other hand, Charlie "saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization."

Charlie dressed in the same working clothes all his life: a denim cap, canvas shirt, worn out overalls, and hobnail boots. Starting as a teenager, Charlie drifted around for work - staying with relatives and living mostly on beans and bread. When Charlie was 16, you could see the man he'd be in his hands. "The hands were magnificent, hung at the ends of his skinny arms like baseball mitts, the grease and dirt and tar permanent as tattoos." And Charlie was machine gun fast on the rooftops, nailing shingles in place.

Charlie longed to have a family and married "that four-eyed gal with black hair and blue eyes, Ava Hamilton."


Picture of Ava Hamilton Bundrum in 1965, with some of her grandchildren

Over the years, Charlie and Ava had seven children, and Charlie excelled at being a daddy. He knew you never let anything happen to your babies. When a neighbor teased Charlie's son with a dog, and the hound bit the boy, Charlie went over and shot the dog.....though he'd have rather shot the man.

Charlie and Ava had a brief period of prosperity after World War I, when Charlie got work in the Alabama steel mills. Charlie got a new car, rented a house in town, and got himself and Ava new clothes. Then 'The Great Depression' hit and Charlie was let go. He resumed renting cabins in the woods, at the end of dirt roads surrounded by poison ivy and blackberry bushes. Charlie often had to relocate for work, and the family moved 21 times over the next ten years.

Bragg observes, "The prosperity they would chase criss-crossing the Alabama-Georgia state line in that overloaded rattletrap cut down Ford was usually only marginally better than the life they'd left behind....Maybe prosperity is too strong a word for it. They pursued the here and now - a sack of flour, a gallon of kerosene, a yard of copper tubing, a new needle and thread."

The depression was hard on the deep south. Babies died from poor diet and simple things like fevers and dehydration. You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money. And the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, didn't have money. 'Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger sounder child a little more."

It was during the depression that Charlie started to make a few gallons of liquor to swap for meal and bacon and coffee. Sometimes the Bundrums moved not because of work, but because a lawman had found Charlie's still.....and the family had to flee before the lawman found Charlie himself.


Lawmen searched for stills

Though things were difficult during the depression, Charlie's children recall, today "that they never really noticed the pain and the poverty that swirled around them, because he loomed over it and would never let it reach them.” Bragg observes, “They did not notice that they ate a whole lot of cornbread, did not notice -- not until much later -- that Charlie and Ava waited to eat until the children had, to make sure there was enough.”

And there was always room for one or two more in Charlie's house.

Hootie, who became an 'adopted' member of the Bundrum family, was an ugly scrawny man, about five feet tall, who lived in a tiny shack along a north Georgia river. Hootie always wore an old army uniform, though he was never a soldier, and lived on fish and whiskey - trading one for the other. Charlie would see Hootie about every month or so, always on the river.

There were stories swirling around about Hootie, one of which was that he'd robbed a bank up north and hidden the money in Mason jars. There were just enough rumors to attract goons who wanted Hootie's money, and every now and then a group of drunks would stop by Hootie's shack and beat him, demanding to know where the money was.

When Charlie found Hootie beaten to a pulp, he got his roofing hatchet and sat on the stoop of Hootie's shack....waiting. But no one came. The next day Charlie took Hootie back to the Bundrum's shack north of Rome, Georgia. Ava said she "reckoned it would be fine.....for a while", but Hootie stayed with the family for years, sleeping in a corner of whatever shack they inhabited.

Bragg writes, "Hootie, because he needed a hero, brought out the light in Charlie's character. Charlie's children pulled [the light] out of him like taffy when they crawled in his lap and felt his nose or tugged his ears. And the liquor made him gleam too, hiding his worries in a golden fog, loosening his tongue, numbing his mind, and reminding him it had been a long long time since he sang Darling Nelly Gray."

Conversely, Bragg says, "Anger, temper, opened up the door on the hot dark basement in Charlie's soul. His actions were so quick and so violent that people wondered how the two sides of his character lived in only one body, as if one leg would wanna go one way and one leg go another, like a poor zombie conjured from goofer dirt. But the anger was not meanness; it was willingness to hurt a man when that man hurt or threatened you or your loved ones. Charlie hit and hit hard, because he believed he had to."

The revenuers were always after Charlie, laying for him on both sides of the state line - but Charlie was elusive. When lawmen came, Charlie tried to melt into the dark. If that didn't work, things got rough. Once, Charlie stomped over one revenuer "like a bull over a rodeo clown" and ran the rest of them into the ground. The fact is, the law never caught Charlie for making whiskey.

Charlie was squeezed between his love for his family and his love for liquor, but he never drank at home. Charlie returned home when his drinking was done.....and staggered into the house. Charlie wasn't a mean drunk. He drank and he laughed, and he sang, and he told good stories.....or sometimes he just went to bed smiling. Charlie liked living and he liked drinking.

One of Charlie's most violent episodes involved some Georgia neighbors, the Reardons. Charlie's family lived near the Reardons for a time in the 1940s, and constantly heard them yelling and fighting. The Reardons loved conflict, made moonshine in the house, and always had the law after them.

One of the Reardon sons, Jerry, had a large girlfriend named Norris. Everyone feared Jerry except for Charlie.....and poor Hootie was scared to death of him. When the Bundrums moved away, Jerry came to their house one night and - with a shotgun pressed into his shoulder - demanded to see Hootie.....claiming Hootie stole some of his liquor.

Charlie didn't have his gun or hammer on him, but did one of the bravest things possible. He walked out and approached Jerry, striding straight toward the shot gun. "You got to leave here," he said. "I got babies in that house." Jerry pulled the trigger, but the shot missed, and Charlie ran at Jerry, "who saw a fist the size of a lard bucket come flying at his nose." Jerry's head snapped back and Charlie grabbed the gun and hit Jerry's teeth. Then Norris came out of the shadows with a hog-killing knife, and Charlie shot her.....and the shot passed through both breasts.

Neither Jerry nor Norris was mortally wounded, the Reardons didn't come back, and the law didn't investigate. Charlie observed, "Some people need shooting and need knocking upside the head"......but Charlie still moved his family back to Alabama, to get some distance from the troublemakers.

After World War II the Bundrums finally lived in one house - in Jacksonville, Alabama - for seven years. The government was giving out surplus 'commodities' every month, which consisted of cans of peanut butter, five pound blocks of American cheese, and the occasional sack of yellow grits, corn meal, flour, oats, or rice.


After World War II, the government gave away surplus commodities

Charlie hadn't changed much on the outside as he passed forty. He still worked hard and drank liquor like water. The fact is, though, that things in the south were changing.

Bragg notes that, "It was not Charlie's world anymore. The revenuers had airplanes now and took a man's picture from the sky." Sheriff Socko Pate busted a still almost every week and Charlie gave up moonshining. It wasn't the same in other ways either. "The State troopers seldom had to chase a man anymore down the dirt roads. They just took down his tag number and sent a car out to fetch him when they felt like it. That to Charlie was just mean. And a man couldn't drive drunk now with all the cars that went so fast on the creeping blacktop."

Also, "If a man fought the police or the deputies in an honest bare knuckle fight it almost seems as if they didn't appreciate the contest in it, like they lost their sense of humor as soon as he balled up his fists. Taking a whupping from Charlie had been almost a rite of passage for a lot of young troopers, deputies, and police, but now the men behind the badges pulled their batons and put a hand on their pistol....and what fun is that? A man didn't do a night in jail anymore to sober up. They took him to the county lockup in Anniston and it cost good money to bail him out, money his family didn't have. The law penned [Charlie] in."

By the Spring of 1958, Ava and Charlie had been together for more than three decades. Sadly, Charlie was sick and nearing the end, without strength and without purpose.....and his body gave out. The cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile the day of Charlie's funeral, and the church couldn't hold all the people. Funeral singers sang about the mystery of death and the beauty of living, and Charlie's friends talked about how much they loved him.

Bragg writes, "Charlie was no myth and not even a legend really, or at least just a small one. It's only when you compare him to today, with this new south, that he seems larger than life. The difference between then and now is his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it. In the new true south it's harder to be poor and proud, harder to work your way into an unapologetic hard-eyed independence. I think Charlie would have done it still, but he was more a man than most, imperfect sure, but a man.....a kind mostly lost to this world forever."

Bragg tells additional stories in the book, about Charlie and other members of the family. For example, Ava beat up a hussie named Blackie Lee for getting too cozy with Charlie; Ava collected purses; Ava's most precious possession was her kerosene lamp; Charlie and two relatives saw a man murdered and thrown in the river; Charlie and Ava's little daughter accidently set herself on fire; Charlie's oldest sons were drafted into the army; Rick Bragg's mother and father had a rocky marriage; and lots more.

Bragg is a wonderful storyteller, and I enjoyed reading about Charlie Bundrum, his extended family, and the culture of the old south.

https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot.... (review with more pictures)

[Cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last August I read Rick Bragg’s “All Over But the Shoutin’” and was swept away by the poetry of his story, his family’s story, a story born of pain and sorrow and sadness and poverty. But as poor as his family might have been, they were rich in love, imagination, tradition, and family, in the things that matter most.

Ava was Bragg’s grandmother, his grandfather Charlie whom he never met as his grandfather’s death preceded Rick Bragg’s birth, and although he knew some details about his grandfather before he set out to write his story, he wanted to hear who this man had been, and so he sought out those old enough to share his grandfather’s stories.

”’After Daddy died,’ my momma told me, ‘it was like there was nothin’.’ I remember the night, an icy night in December, I asked three of Charlie Bundrum’s daughter to tell me about his funeral. I sat in embarrassment as my aunts, all in their sixties, just stared hard at the floor. Juanita, tough as whalebone and hell, began to softly cry, and Jo, who has survived Uncle John and ulcers, wiped at her eyes. My mother, Margaret, got up and left the room. For coffee, she said. What kind of man was this, I wondered, who is 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, I thought to myself, probably deserves a book.”

The beauty of this book, and there is so much beauty inside, is in Rick Bragg’s telling of this story of Charlie Bundrum’s life, how he came to be married to Ava when she was just sixteen and he was seventeen. The life they lived, the children they had, the heartaches, the happiness, the upheaval, the pursuit of a tiny bit of prosperity, and the abundance of love.

It is also a story of the Great Depression, its impact on an area still suffering economic atrophy from Reconstruction.

”People with deep roots stood fast in the doorways of ancestral homes, and lost everything. People without roots, the wanderers like Charlie Bundrum, drifted with the times, and survived.”

Bragg’s older brother, Sam, is old enough to have been saved a bit by Charlie, he has a dime on a string he has almost always owned, given to him by their grandfather Charlie, but while his memories of the man are tied to this dime, they lack the shine and definition that the dime has, in some areas.
On a day they went out to fish, and Rick Bragg is unusually successful; where his older brother, who has heretofore outfished his baby brother, has caught nothing this day, Bragg has caught six bass. Sam dismisses it, saying:
“’Ricky,’ he said, ‘I was fishin’ for the big fish.
Then he stared up at a perfect blue sky, a sky without a cloud.
‘And everybody knows,’ he said, ‘the big fish won’t bite on a bluebird day.’
I just looked at him, because I did not have a rock to throw. On the one day I outfish him, he is spouting poetry.

Yet I could not help but wonder where that phrase, that lovely phrase, came from. Who still talks like that, I wondered, in a modern-day South that has become so homogenized, so bland, that middle school children in Atlanta make fun of people who sound Southern? I found it was just something my grandfather and men like him used to say, something passed down to him, to us, like a silver pocket watch.

“A man like Charlie Bundrum doesn’t leave much else, not title or property, not even letters in the attic. There’s just stories, all told second-and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers. The thing to do, if you can, is write them down on new paper.”

Bragg’s writing is magical, easily transporting me back to another era before my time, a place I’ve likely never been, to hear stories about people I’ve never met, - but I could see it all so clearly, could see the lightening bugs, and smell Charlie’s likker, hear Charlie telling his own stories.
But there is more, as much as I loved hearing Charlie’s story, Ava’s Man’s story, there’s Rick Bragg, himself, all of his family, the strong sense of family, the draw that keeps us returning to that place, those people that our hearts know as family, that are hearts see as home.


“Can I get a hallelujah
Can I get an amen
Feels like the Holy Ghost running through ya
When I play the highway FM
I find my soul revival
Singing every single verse
Yeah I guess that’s my church”
Maren Morris - My Church written by Michael Ford Busbee, Maren Morris


Recommended

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Rick Bragg. I love his family almost as much as he does. I love his writing. I suspect that most of us have working class roots and can relate to elements of this family's story.
If you haven't read this author yet, give yourself a treat and run to the bookstore or library. If you have, then you are nodding your head in agreement.

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ava’s Man is the second book of the Family Trilogy by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Bragg, the first book, All Over But the Shoutin’. I obtained my copy of Ava’s Man from Thriftbooks, and it was with a few nice surprises. This first edition book published in 2001 was signed by Rick Bragg and within the book was the program entitled An Evening with Rick Bragg, Saturday, August 25, 2001 at the Radisson Hotel, Birmingham, Alabama. The program was sponsored by the Alabama Booksmith. And their introduction to Rick Bragg, a portion as follows: “Don’t let Rick Bragg’s folksy ambiance prevent your realizing that underneath this ‘aw shucks’ exterior lies one of America’s most brilliant writers.” So now I have another bookstore explore in my travels in southern literature exploration with scheduled stops in Mississippi and in Alabama.

Rick Bragg tells of his grandmother Ava, widowed young and never remarried. When as a young boy he would ask his grandmother if she was gonna get a man, she would start rocking, and with satisfaction say, “I had me one.”

“His name was Charlie Bundrum and he was probably the only man on earth who could love that woman and not perish in the flame.
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, who ran a trotline across the Coosa baited with chicken guts and caught washtubs full of catfish, who cooked good white whiskey in the pines, drank his own product and sang, laughed and buck-danced, under the stars. He was a man whose tender heart was stitched together with steel wire, who stood beaten and numb over a baby’s grave in Georgia, then took a simple-minded man into his home to protect him from scoundrels who liked to beat him for fun. He was a man who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name, but who was bad to drink too much, miss his turn into the driveway and run over his own mailbox.”

This is the story of Rick Bragg’s grandfather, a man who died a year before he was born, and as he says, “He died in the spring of 1958, one year before I was born. I have never forgiven him for that.” This beautiful book flashes with respect and affection, not only for Charlie Bundrum, but for the vanishing culture that he represents, one that we will be the poorer for losing. In the decade of the Great Depression, Charlie moved his family twenty-one times, keeping his seven children one step ahead of the poverty and starvation that threatened them. This book is a loving tribute to the grandfather he never knew—a father who stood by his family in hard times and left a backwoods legend behind—in a book that blazes with his love for his family and for a particular stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border. His children revered him. In his search for work, he’d move his family about the wild and dangerous South, a landscape of ridges and hollows and deep woods, ramshackle houses, muddy rivers, and water moccasins, but he knew how to make his family feel secure and loved.

Ava’s Man is a beautiful book with a young man discovering his grandfather through the stories and tales from his mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. And the larger story is about the Great Depression and its effects. It is also about a transition from an old South to a new South and its impact.

“In a time when a nation drowning in its poor never so resented them, in the lingering pain of Reconstruction, in the Great Depression and in the recovery that never quite reached all the way to my people, Charlie Bundrum took giant steps in run-down boots. He grew up in hateful poverty, fought it all his life and died with nothing except a family that worshiped him and a name that gleams like new money. When he died mourners packed Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church. Men in overalls and oil-stained jumpers and women in dresses bought on Peachtree Street, and even the preacher cried.”

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always been fascinated by family history from the time I saw Susan and Gordon create a family tree on Sesame Street. I must have been no older than four, but, of course, I asked my mom to draw our family tree for us. My grandma must have told me our family tree countless times from the time I knew how to write, and I memorized her maternal family. My dad’s family all settled in Chicago, and he was lucky enough to know his grandparents even if their relationship was not the warmest; it was the era in which they lived, yet he still can not let it go. Despite that, he grew up amongst extended family who met from time to time at family club gatherings. As a teen, I once helped his aunt recreate one, the only family reunion I ever attended in my life. It was fascinating to say the least. Rick Bragg is a gifted writer who has traveled the world for his writing, yet one person is like a magnet and keeps bringing him home to northwest Alabama. That man is his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, who passed away the year before Bragg was born, and he never let his grandfather forget it. Because most of his kin consists of hardworking, blue collar men and women from Alabama, Bragg took it upon himself to preserve his family history in written form. Ava’s Man which tells the story of his grandfather’s life is the middle book in his family story trilogy, a story that I’d like to get through before the turn of the calendar year. As my own family genealogist, these stories fascinate me, and Charlie’s in particular.

When Rick Bragg decided to tell the story of his grandfather’s life, he interviewed aunts, uncles, cousins, and other kin. Charlie Bundrum was a man who could drive away storms and hang the moon. Forty years after his funeral, his children began to cry. They could not bare to talk about their father. “What kind of man was this,” Bragg wondered, “who is 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, Bragg thought to himself, probably deserves a book.” Thus, the research for Ava’s Man began. The Bundrums first came to America as Bondurants, Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in 17th century France. The family originally came to Baltimore harbor and slowly migrated southeast and reached the red hills of the Georgia-Alabama border. The name changed from Bondurant to Bundren to Bundrum, and there the family remained until present day making a living off of the land. The family was indicative of the old south and would remain so even after society encroached on their way of life. Charlie Bundrum represented a bridge from the old to the new and preferred the older, simpler way of life. This man was larger than life and was revered by all who knew him, especially his children and grandchildren. Rick Bragg would only know this man through stories.

Charlie married Ava Hamilton when the two were just teenagers, children really. They both were talented musicians and loved to make music together. She was well read, could have wed a college man, and listed the Presleys as kin. He came from working folk and was proud of it. Ava’s father feared a marriage to a man from a lesser station in life, but the two completed each other and were married for over thirty years. As soon as the the first baby James arrived, the Great Depression came shortly after. Charlie moved his family over fifty times in those lean years, crisscrossing Georgia and Alabama, in search of work. He was primarily a carpenter who built homes and always wore his one pair of overalls and a cap. Charlie and Ava always managed to have food for their children, and they would never eat until they made sure that all of the children were fed. He lived for his children, the girls especially, and Ava knew it, never interfering. His favorite of all the children was his daughter Margaret, Bragg’s mother, who contained all of Charlie’s good and none of his faults. He recognized her as the most needy of his children and would provide for her for the rest of his life, doting on her one son that he was privileged to know. As hardened as a man that Charlie Bundrum was, he lived for being a father and later a grandfather. They were his pride and joy.

Charlie built whiskey stills in parts of the woods that kept him away from the law, outrunning the county for over thirty years. This was an era when people lived off of the land and defended their family honor. Charlie taught his sons James and William how to fight from an early age, explaining the difference between defending kin and fighting us for the heck of it. Charlie would lay down the law with his boys and anyone else who attempted to defame the family name. Many young law enforcement agents got their feet wet chasing after Bundrum, but it usually amounted to nothing. Charlie was at his happiest in the woods while drinking a pint of liquor, weaving yarns about halcyon days, and fishing. Charlie could fish like none other, mainly because during the Depression his family depended on a day’s catch for their supper. Relatives would say that Charlie was the best fisherman around, and his nephew Travis had many stories to share about fishing trips with his uncle, which showed the measure of the man that he was. Despite being hardened from a young age, Charlie was also incredibly kind to people who had less than him, the epitome when he took in a hobo named Jessie Clines, known to all as Hootie, for over twenty years. If Charlie was hard on people, he did so out of love, and it is apparent why he is not forgotten in his part of the world, Bragg noting that one day someone should erect a statute of the man. Someday, someone probably will.

Like many people, Rick Bragg grew up idolizing his grandfather. The man could, it was said, drive away storms, hang the moon, and outsmart the law. Only his love of liquor brought his life to a premature end, and Ava never recovered, a part of her dying, never remarrying. Bragg grew up with his grandmother living in his home, but it was his grandfather Charlie who continued to be revered by his descendants decades after his death. Even though his ancestors had been travelers, the Bundrums remained in northeastern Alabama, anchored by this man who continues to protect them from above. Rick Bragg decided to write the story of his grandfather, who was larger than life. I have been drawn to this story because my grandfather might have been a hardened man, but he also anchored his family and they never went without food, even when the years were lean. I think that my grandfather would have gotten along fine with Charlie Bundrum, telling yarns and singing the lyrics of the Great Depression. Men from that generation are not made like that today, which is why preserving family histories on paper is oh so important. Not everyone can write like Rick Bragg, but in reading Charlie’s story, perhaps other readers will be moved to pen the stories of their families, filled with men who were larger than life.

4 stars

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

NO SPOILERS!!!

On completion: I am sad to leave this book. It was a delight to read. I fell in love with Charlie, Ava's Man. the author's grandfather. Rick Bragg talked with all his relatives to find out about his grandfather. He was in fact born after his death. It wasn't easy finding out about Charlie because when he died everybody simply could no longer talk about him. It was too hurtful. You can look at this man and say he wasn't so great; he did so many things he shouldn't do. The fact is he was great! Why? Well, because he did so many things he should do, too, and he did these things so darn well. He was a great father. You could depend upon him. The times were tough, but he pulled all of his kids through except one who died. He pulled them through to such an extent that they never wanted to be far from him. They could always rely on him. So how bad is it to make a little likker on the side, to cuss, to wear ventilated, sometimes dirty, patched overalls and to brawl now and then when you see what he did achieve. He gave security and love to those in his famuily. He built a wall around his home and he never brought his likker inside that wall. He knew that would cause grief, So he stuck to that rule. I recommend you read this book because it is a delight to know this person. I see him as a model figure for how a father should be. At the same time you really learn how it was to live through the Depression in the South. I like books that teach something. This did. The witing was magical because it conveyed a time and a place that I didn't know at all and made it so real I could touch and smell and see and hear and feel it inside of me. Maybe I should have given it five stars, but I think I didn't quite feel for any of the other characters as much. When he dies the book looses steam, but that is only about a chapter from the last page. Not terribly much happens, but you do get to know a wonderful human being! I feel most comfortable with four stars, so that is what it gets.

*****************************************

OK, this is my last quote, for more you must read the book. So all the men, just about all of them were making their own likker, down in the South along the border between Georgia and Alabama. Charlie simply had to, during the Depression you took any opportunity available to bring home a little cash, for food or to pay doctors. He had six kids! And his likker never killed anyone. He made good likker. Nothing poisonous, like others did. It wasn't a big operation, no indeed.

The revenuers there paid absolutely no mind to Charlie Bundrum or his little moonshine still, it would have been like arresting someone for popping bubble gum in the middle of Mardi Gras. (page 143)

***********************************

I am halway through, and enjoying every minute of it. Rick Bragg can write. He can make stories about likker and lightning bugs and ghosts. You will believe them just as I do. What a storyteller!

Ghost stories begin like this. But then drinking stories, begin this way too. (Page 130)

I don't drink, b/c it's messy with diabetes. It is not that I have anything against others that do! The book takes place during the Prohibition, and I am a law-abiding type, but these stories are delightful.

Men drank. Men worked. Men fought.

By the time you were thirteen or fourteen, you were a man, or else something pitiful.......

But this was one of the reasons they loved him.(Ava's man, i.e. Charlie, the author's grandfather)His nature, his fine nature, was not turned ugly by it. He drank and he laughed and he drank and he sang and he drank and he told good stories, and sometimes he drank and he just went to bed smiling. (page 132)

The prose is like a song.

***************************************
Just a taste of the author's wonderful knack for telling a story:

(Page44-45)
By his momma's death, Charlie was more man than most ever get, a tall, hard, strong and smiling man, as if he were immune to the fires that had scorched him, if not purified by them.

He lived for fiddle music and corn likker, and became a white-hot banjo picker, and a buck dancer and a ladies' man, because women just love a man who can dance. At seventeen he could cut lumber all day, then tell stories all night, and people in the foothills said he would never settle down or maybe even amount to much. But the boy would charma bird off a wire. And there seemed to be no fear in him, no fear at all. It was almost as if he had died already, met the devil and knew he could charm him or trick him or even whip him, because what did ol' Scratch have left to show him that he had not already seen.

You get folk songs too, that make you want to hum along. And if yu are wondering what a buck dancer is, worry no more. Read the book, and you will know and be able to see it in your mind's eye.

This book is about the author's grandfather and mother who grew up in the Appalachian foothills, in towns straddling the Alabama and Georgia state line, before and during the Depression. I can tell right now that one should pick up this book to roll the words around in your mouth before swallowing them. The author won a Pulitzer Prize. I think it was for this book, if I remember correctly.

And I love reading it on my Kindle! Can reading be this simple and delightful?!

[Jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb writing in an outstanding and for me, absolutely memorable geographic placement. 80/ 100 miles either side of the Alabama / Georgia border-toward the North.

What a gift for Christmas week this family tale and Father Charlie's life story is. For sure the best and most singular to exact metaphor, dialect, comparisons and bonding emotions that I've read in many a year. And this goes in my top 5 for this decade (all I have read) without question. My book has a 2001 copyright and Bragg's works are not in great numbers within my library system. That I can possibly change.

Ava and Charlie and their 8 offspring! And the years of the Great Depression! And all the wild open river lands of these back woods and hills! And the before and the afterwards of "better than before". But always moving from rental to rental. All of them as they are added. And also Hootie too, don't forget Hootie! All alive, so alive. Within lyrical and poetic spirits of varying but also of highest natures' tales. Anger served too for purposes justified.

It's chronological, it's inclusive (no cliff hangers unrevealed to their conclusions) and it's just the best savvy nuance writing too. Altogether and as strongly Southern as Charlie's "homemade" product.

Too many good quotes to add just a couple. Many made me laugh. As the comparison to the "in house" alcohol producing stile outfit which made Charlie's insignificant, be it next door that particular year. Charlie's was noticed "as much as a gum bubble pop at Mardi Gras". Lovely, lovely succinct phrasing- just like that but natural world splendor never over looked in the longer and lyrical descriptions.

He (Charlie) should have a stone or brass statue in the center of the square in Jacksonville standing today. The 19th century working man! Father, husband, friend, woodsman swinging his hammer.

No question that I will read his other novels. He writes people and place into life.

[Kirk Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this so much I could almost just start over and read again. I found Rick Bragg's style to be pure reading pleasure. Gosh that was good!

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read All Over But the Shoutin' about 10 years ago, and thought it amazing. Why I have waited so long to read another Rick Bragg book, I have no idea.

Ava's Man is the story of Charlie Bundrum, Mr. Bragg's grandfather, who died before he was born. It is a living story though, vibrant and powerful, showing why Charlie Bundrum is a legend in his own family, but also showing his flaws.

Mr. Bragg has a wonderful facility with words, and there are so many delightful turns of phrase in this book. You just skip from one to the next, sucking them in and turning them over in your mouth, like hard candy. Ava's Man was really a pleasure to read.

Living in North Alabama myself, I enjoyed the familiarity of many of the locales and marvelled at how much the characters in the book reminded me of people I know. More than just a story of his own family, Mr. Bragg tells the story of a place and a time in a truly beautiful way.

I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Bragg speak at a recent book festival in Nashville and he made me laugh hard and think harder. So did this book. I sat down to write this review and gave the book four stars, as I thought it not as excellent a read as All Over but the Shoutin'. Heck, though, what is? This one rates five too.

[Snotchocheez · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2004, I (by happenstance, if not a strange, whimsical predestination) found myself uprooted from 35 years of stasis in Los Angeles, and replanted in semi-rural Northeast Alabama. Many of my friends and acquaintances back home (and, heck, most people I meet here) wonder why I'd do something that crazy. I really don't have an explanation for any of them, but after reading Rick Bragg's brilliant love-letter to NE Alabama and his family ("Ava's Man"), I can direct any questioners of my sanity to this book to glean why I might possibly have found my life (and my home) here, in a place where the 21st century struggles to catch up with the rest of the country.

Had I not been recommended this book by a friend of mine, I probably wouldn't have given Mr. Bragg's account of life here (and more specifically, of his grandfather Charlie Bundrum) a second glace. Biographies tend to bore me senseless, and upon encountering this book at Guntersville Library (with a visage of a sepia-toned nondescript nattily-dressed depression-era man) I thought it'd be a snooze-fest.

Needless to say, it's not. While I live today not more than 40 minutes from the Coosa River (whose banks were in proximity of many of the places the Bundrum family relocated to to escape the ravages of poverty in Depression-era Alabama), the book's message (while South-centric) is absolutely universal. At first perusal, it just seems like a fawning tribute by a former-Alabamian to his grandfather. When you dig a little deeper, you discover a burbling, vibrant pulse coursing through the book's veins. There's much more here than meets the eye. Mr. Bragg (a Pulitzer Prize winner for Feature Writing in 1996 while writing for the New York Times at their Atlanta desk, and a dyed-in-the wool Alabamian) brings his talents to the fore in providing a patchwork pastiche describing the jubilation, the heartbreak, the enduring (and unbreakable) ties that that bind the Bundrum family together in one of the most adverse of scenarios imaginable.

Mr. Bragg does in 250 pages what I'd never be able to do: describe (big ugly warts and all) my newly adopted home, and explain (concisely, and universally) its appeal to me. The best I can do is sing the book's praises to every potential reader I encounter, and hope that some take my advice and just read the damn book, already. (In light of the fact that despite the book's settings being one hour north and west of here, and that a whole chapter is devoted to the town of Guntersville, AL where I live, and that I checked this book (written in 2001) out from Guntersville Library, and find from the "date due" stamped page that only FIVE of my fellow patrons checked it out before me, I've certainly got a lot of work to do).

[Chrisl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the decades I got to buy books for the library's users, Publishers Weekly was one of the constant sources of book reviews. Here's one:
"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."

[Tom Mathews · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. Rick Bragg, with this tribute to a grandfather he never met, has succeeded in doing this in a manner that far exceeds anything I could ever aspire to. 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 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.

My thanks to the folks at the On the Southern Literary Trail group for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books.

[JG (Introverted Reader) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rick Bragg never knew his maternal grandfather, Charlie, but the man is a legend among the family and friends he left behind. A good provider, a loving father, a teasing husband, a loyal friend, he was also a bootlegger who loved his own product and had a temper. He never turned it on anyone who didn't deserve it, and apparently some of the best stories about him took place when he'd been drinking.

My uncle has been telling me for--oh, years now, that I just have to read Rick Bragg. I do take his recommendations seriously, but my to-read list is out of control and I'm just now getting to him. How I wish I had listened to my uncle earlier. I will not be waiting years to read more of Bragg's work, that is for sure.

This book was great. It just felt like home, and can there be any higher praise for a book? Granted, my daddy doesn't drink alcohol and my parents still live in the same house we grew up in, but Bragg's language and stories felt right in a way that is hard to explain. They settled on me like well-worn clothes or shoes, for all that I've never read his work before. Read this: "He spoke in the language--the very specific language--of the Appalachian foothills. It was an unusual mix of formal English and mountain dialect. The simple word 'him' was two distinct sounds--'he-yum.' And a phrase like "Well, I better go," was, in the language of our people, more likely to sound like 'Weeeelllll, Ah bet' go.' Some words are chopped off and some are stretched out till they moan, creating a language like the terrain itself. Think of that language as a series of mountains, cliffs, valleys, and sinkholes, where only these people, born and raised here, know the trails." Yes. That. I have never and don't think I will ever read a better description of our dialect. That is it, right there. Don't judge it; listen to it and relax into it, give us time to get to our point, and enjoy the ride.

It's easy to see why Charlie's family still mourns him. His breed is becoming more and more scarce in the "New South." Bragg writes about this in his epilogue. "The realities of this new, true South are not as romantic as in Charlie's time, as bleak and painful as that time was for people of his class. The new, true South is, for people like him, a South of mills that will never reopen, of fields that will never be planted again, of train tracks that are being turned into bicycle trails. In the new, true South, it is harder to be poor and proud, harder to work your way into an unapologetic, hard-eyed independence." It's true. But we still see remnants and throwbacks from that time, and we honor them. Men like Charlie might not have had much education, but they did what they had to do to feed their families and they never backed down. They wrung every bit of life that they could out of their allotted time.

All that sounds all serious, but my favorite parts were the funny stories, and there were plenty of those. I kept reading bits aloud to my husband, and even he (not a Southerner or a reader) would bust out laughing. He'll still say, "But God ain't that gravy good," and crack himself up. That was a great story. I think I read that one to anyone who would listen for a few days, and they all laughed out loud as well. There are a few run-ins with the law, some run-ins with honest-to-goodness criminals, tales of fishing on the river, friends and strays picked up and cared for along the way, children and grandchildren loved beyond all reason, and Charlie's own hilarious quirks and screw-ups.

There's no big theme or lesson or plot here, just stories about a good man doing his best in a changing world. Except that is a lesson in itself, isn't it? Bragg obviously misses the grandfather he never met, and he writes so beautifully about Charlie that I miss him as well. Pick this one up, laugh and cry by turns, and be thankful that you got to know him too.

[d Kate dooley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book to read outloud to your best friend. Then read it again, so you repeat all the good parts to yourself. Read it while the rain falls on a tin roof. Read it beside the woodstove. Read it in the cab of a pickup truck while the windshield wipers keep time. Read it to your kids. Read it to your kids in the rain by the light of a kerosene lamp. Keep it on a shelf in the kitchen and when you're feeling down, open anywhere and read. It's like music from an old time radio.

[Kate Moore Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charlie Bundrum, a poor man with too-big overalls and scarred hands, shaped a community and generations of his family before he was sixty years old. Bragg’s grandfather lived at a turning point in southern history, and his way of living was left behind. Bragg beautifully tells his family’s story through the stories shared about his maternal grandfather, and he shows that a man doesn’t have to be perfect, well-educated, or eloquent to make an impact. Charlie simply lived on river, whiskey stills, and rooftops, all while loving his family, protecting the bullied, and giving generously when there was barely anything to give.
A sweet read and lovely peak into the final days of the true rural south.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding.

[Suzanne Hamilton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is Rick Bragg's paean to his grandfather, a man he never met, a man about whom no one ever spoke until Rick asked 40 years after his grandfather's death from alcoholism. Charlie Bundrum is portrayed as a larger-than-life hero: a consummate woodsman, clever bootlegger, loved, and adored by all. He also struggled to provide for his family, rejected stability, was uncompromising; he wished to live by his credo alone. I didn't read Bragg's book about his grandmother, All Over But the Shoutin'. Perhaps I'd have a better understanding of his grandmother if I had; in this book, she is not kindly described. Maybe I'm too far into the 21st century to look upon Charlie Bundrum with admiration or sympathy. A person has to drink a lot to kill himself with alcohol at the age of 50. Charlie could hunt, fish, make moonshine, drive a nail, work hard. But he couldn't clothe or house his family. Not so noble a man, in my eyes.
I also got tired of the author's constant rhapsodizing and adulatory tone. It was like hearing tales of Paul Bunyon or John Henry. In fact, Bragg evokes John Henry at one point. This was hagiography, not open-eyed storytelling. It just didn't work for me.

[Franky · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't get into this one as much as others. I realize the author is honoring a member of his family with a memoir, but I really wasn't invested in some of the stories and tales of the past about Charlie. I understand it is supposed to be light and humorous with all the drinking and brawlin' but couldn't really get interested in the book as many of the theme had the same themes and were repetitive. In the end, I felt a little cold by most of it. Plus, the narrative was a little too jumpy and rambling most of the time.

All that being said, I've heard some good things about Braggs' works, and this was my first read from him, so, who knows, maybe I'll try another one and see if it's better.

[Kraby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is definitely on my top ten favorites shelf, and will remain there no matter how many more books I may read and love. The language conveys a heavy, burdened, hot rural Depression-era south, and with so much love and respect. Rick Bragg never got to meet his grandfather and has pieced together this tale from stories gathered from aunts, his mother, grandmother and friends. Charlie Bundrum is an everyday hero, working hard and trying to feed a family on a meager existence in a time when no one had much of anything except their family to lean on. One part that stays with me always is this: For years after her husband's death, people would ask Ava Bundrum why she didn't go get herself a man. She'd always reply, "I ain't goin' get me no man. I had me one." There are so many wonderfully sweet, heartbreaking, beautiful stories here- it's dense with adoration, and for good reason. Charlie Bundrum isn't typically the kind of person a book gets written about, but after reading, you'll know why Rick Bragg wrote it. I've read this book twice now, and I have listened to the audiobook read by the author more times than that. I can't get enough, nor can I say enough about how much this book affected me. I have given it as a gift to more than one person- if you have a heart and love to read a master-storyteller unfold his craft, you'll fall in love with this book, too.

[John Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

For quite some time, I've enjoyed Rick Bragg's editorials and stories in the back pages of Southern Living magazine. I found them glib, witty and well-crafted. I looked forward to each delivery, first turning to the back page when my subscription arrived.

"Ava's Man" is also glib, witty and well-crafted. I found myself chagrined at the foolishness of Charlie's antics, commiserating with and sympathy for Ava's tribulations, rooting for Hootie and understanding the love for and faith of Charlie's children and grandchildren in him. I laughed and cried with the family. I marveled at Bragg's turn of a phrase, his descriptions of his characters and the colorful way he painted with words. Memories of my own upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s resurfaced -- the rustic and primitive logging and fishing villages we called home, the tar paper shacks we lived in, the never-ending pot of beans and biscuits, the patched and tattered hand-me-down dungarees, and all us kids with our list of chores. In spite, we didn't know we were poor. We just knew we were loved and cherished, just as were Juanita, Margaret, James, Sam and all their siblings. "Ava's Man" is a marvelous adventure. I was disappointed that it ended.

[Marne - Reader By the Water · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a gift, so I hate to say I didn't like it, but...well. I loved "All Over But the Shoutin" but found this book difficult to follow. I kept losing track - is this the great-grandfather? Grandfather? Mother or Grandmother?

I may have become oversaturated with Bragg's style since I read "Shoutin." He has a full-page article in the back of every Southern Living issue, and I feel he's a bit too much. People magazine is quoted on the back of the book saying Bragg is "As toothsome as a catfish supper," but to me, he douses the catfish with too much gravy and hot sauce, just for the sake of showing he has so much gravy and hot sauce.

[Hannah Herrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Skip this if you’re tired of hearing me rave about Bragg’s writing. It’s just so rich and personal and perfect. Every single time I read a book of his I laugh AND cry and that is rare for me personally. He captures life in rural alabama/miss/Georgia in a way that doesn’t hide it’s flaws and complications but shows the simple power of family and hard work and love. I feel like I know and love his grandfather now, and losing him was also my loss. That’s the mark of an incredible writer. Y’all get on and read this book, ya hear?????

[Amy Kannel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some people can tell a good story—-the kind that makes you crazy to find out what happens, and then brokenhearted when it’s over. Some people can string words and sentences together in a way that makes the English language sing, and makes you marvel at the craft of writing. Rick Bragg is both, brilliantly. His sequel to All Over But the Shoutin’ is every bit as poignant and stirring.

[Barbara Nutting · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bragg is marvelous at bringing Appalachia alive. He is so accepting of his hillbilly relatives, he just loves them to death, warts and all. This book was a beautiful tribute to a grandfather he never knew. He has recreated the “Old South” with muddy rivers and whiskey stills, old women rocking on their porches and a ton of babies crying and kids playing in the hard packed earth.
The poverty was unbelievable, these were the Depression and war years, but somehow they managed to survive.

I wish he had written this book before “All over but the Shoutin” - I felt like I read the sequel first, which I guess I did!! This was the grandparents and Shoutin’ was his mother, which picks up where this one ended. Both were excellent regardless!

PS - Joy to the World, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 👍🇺🇸 11/7/2020

[K Jackson]

dnf at 7 pages that might be a new record for me - the comma usage is WILD

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW!! I love this book. Rick Bragg can really write. It could almost make me read The Jessica Lynch Story. I love this portriat of a true Southern Man. These people are so real in my mind. I knew them in Dayton, Tn and Summerville, GA and a hundred other small Southern towns.

[Blaine Welgraven · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Grandma," we would ask, in a joke that spanned twenty years, "you goin' to get you a man?"

"No, hon," she would say, "I ain't goin' to get me no man." And then she would start to rock, with satisfaction.

"I had me one."

--Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

A beautiful, humorous ode to a different time, an overlooked place, and an untamed people, Ava's Man remained a literary fixture in my childhood home - referenced frequently throughout my teenage years and featured prominently on one of our (many) bookshelves.

Sadly, I never got around to actually reading any of Rick Bragg's work until my mid-30s, but something about this book's cover stayed with me. And there was the name - Ava. Long before I knew the varied etymologies of the word - or its present association with concepts like freedom and grace - the name stuck with me, ultimately to be given by two tired parents to their first daughter, a beautiful girl, who waited resolutely until she could be born merely 10-minutes into Advent Day, 2013.

We added a Gaelic twist to it, inserting an "e" between the "a" and the "v." Aeva.

I could only hope the beautiful woman I call my daughter inherits some of the spirit found in Ava Bundrum. And indeed, she has.

For that's the thing. Ava's Man is about Charlie Bundrum, the man the author never met, his grandfather. The discovery is a wonderful journey, a reminder of the importance of name, heritage, and place, an intimate portrait of a man who remained to the end completely wild at heart. But behind every scene, every line, every adventure, remains Ava. Strength, determination, grit, and loyalty - a remarkable woman. Without her, the story is incomplete.

I highly recommend.

[Yaaresse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great way to end the 2017 reading year. It's a solid 4.5, but I'm rounding up for sentimental reasons. I see a lot of my step-grandad, dad and uncles in this book. (I was going to say "aside from the moonshine," but now that I think about it....)

Ava's Man is the second of Rick Bragg's books about his family. Where All Over but the Shoutin' focused mostly on Bragg's mother and the family's conflicted emotions surrounding his mostly absent, alcoholic, and abusive father, this book goes farther into the past and focuses on Bragg's maternal grandfather. As usual, Bragg doesn't pretty up much, but it's clear that Charlie Bundrum was a larger-than-life man who, like many southern men in the early 1900s rural south, worked hard and lived harder.

While I enjoyed both books, I think this one flows a little better and is more focused. This isn't necessarily a sequel, but it probably is a good idea to read them in order since he does give a more basic explanation of how everyone is related in the first book.

[Judi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This biography of Charlie Bundrum, Ava's Man, resonated so very much with my own memories of my grandpas. I treasured every single little detail of those hard times during the Great Depression. Both of my grandpas had large families. Both families had to rely on Mama to care for the kids, garden, livestock. The grandpas were on the road most of the time. My Mom was one of ten children, the oldest girl. My Dad was one of five, the oldest boy. The rustic shacks with no electricity, no indoor plumbing sparked my early memories of visiting family. Shacks on dirt roads. My Mom's family lived in the country outside of Lone Rock, Wisconsin. My Dad's family was from Potneck, Tennessee. Both of my parents set out for Southern California, the promised land, in the late 1930's. Never looked back. Rick Bragg gives my family voice. The audio version enriched the story.

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rick Bragg wrote an evocative loving tribute to his family. It made me think of my own family, who struggled through those hard old days. They were in NH, not the South, but also hard working poor folk. My grandmother got up early and fired up the woodstove, to make a breakfast that included pork chops and apple pie. She couldn't send her "boys" to the fields and the woods on toast and poached eggs.
I love a book that leaves me with a lump in my throat, and the desire to make a pan of biscuits.