What a terrific book! Heartbreaking, hilarious and hopeful all in one. I could listen to Rick Bragg talk all day and all night. He's a wonderful storyteller and great narrator. I backed up and re-listened to parts, just because I didn't want it to end. I'm looking forward to reading more of this fabulous Southern author. He tells of a world I've never experienced, and makes it so real. A great education that feels like a lark! ( )

It was going real good but I ran out of time and had to turn it back in to the library.

This third installment in Rick Bragg’s family saga wobbles a bit at first, but quickly gets its legs under it as Bragg searches for a new understanding of the father he remembered only as a disruptive force who came and went with the violence of a hurricane.

What he found, through the eyes and voices and memories of relatives and childhood friends was a child born to a family of hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-fisted men, a child who grew into a boy of stubbornness and pride and a refusal to give an inch, and a boy who became a man touched early and often by the liquor and violence that had nurtured him.

Bragg intersperses these interviews with brief vignettes about becoming a father unexpectedly in his forties, when he married a woman with three boys, the youngest only five when Bragg began courting their mother. Somehow, the contrast between this child, growing up without his father present, and Bragg himself making the same journey but in very different shoes, drove him to want to learn more about the angry ghost who had for so long haunted his life.

What he finds does not lead to a Hallmark Movie Moment of forgiveness and redemption, but it does allow him to discover a man whose memory he can live with and whose struggles he acknowledges. Along the way, Bragg produces his powerful and lyric prose, dragged up from his soul and hammered into a thing of beauty on the page.

Bragg understands innately that time and place create the man. His descriptions of the brutal, man-eating cotton mills of the mid-20th century South equal anything Upton Sinclair ever wrote about the killing floors of Chicago’s meat-packing houses, threaded through with a dark and terrible poetry thrown in at no extra charge. He writes of times and places that no longer exist, acknowledging both their beauty and their cruelty, with the understanding that both of those forces created the man who fathered, loved, disappointed, and abandoned him.

Taken together, All Over But the Shoutin, Ava’s Man, and The Prince of Frogtown are monumental as portraits of a vanished way of life, and a heartbreakingly real story of an American family. ( )

What a great author! After reading his previous books quite awhile ago I reacquainted myself with his wonderful prose. His descriptive stories puts you right in the thick of things. This was a book about his alcoholic father and having to revisit the memory due to becoming a stepfather to a 10 year old. Makes you laugh out loud and shed a tear or two. Great book! ( )

After reading Rick Bragg's book, All Over But the Shouting, I longed to hear his voice. I wanted to experience all his wonderful "southernisms" in their home dialect. I'm just at the beginning of The Prince of Frogtown, but so far I'm not disappointed. It sounds like a cross between a poetry reading and a noirmal audio book. Hearing it, I know Rick Bragg relishes his home tongue as much as I do. ( )