SOURCE: "Dirty Laundry," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 14, 1997, p. 9.

[Below, Emerson offers a positive review of Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin', noting that she wished he had included more excerpts of his articles previously published in the New York Times.]

The idea of a journalist born in 1959 writing his memoirs, with no great wars or historic events to report, is surprising. But what Rick Bragg gives us in All Over but the Shoutin' is his own story, a record of a life that has been harrowing, cruel and yet triumphant, written so beautifully he makes the book a marvel. "This is not an important book," he writes. "It is only the story of a strong woman, a tortured man and three sons who lived hemmed in by thin cotton and ragged history in northeastern Alabama…." He put off writing All Over but the Shoutin'...