SOURCE: A review of All Over but the Shoutin', in Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1997, p. 995.

[Below, the critic gives a positive review of Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin'.]

A celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter turns his investigative attention to his own past: growing up poor and making his way from rural Alabama to the top of his profession.

[Rick] Bragg, who was born in 1959, is poetic and convincing on his family's poverty and how it chipped away at their dreams "to the point that the hopelessness show[ed] through." His father, violent and an alcoholic, figures here, as do his siblings, but this is above all a son's story of love and respect for a mother who picked cotton, cleaned houses, and took in washing and ironing, determined to secure for her children the chance at a successful life that poverty had denied her. Bragg...