by Rick Bragg
First published 2001
Rick Bragg reconstructs the life of Charlie Bundrum, the grandfather he never met who raised his mother Margaret in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression. Bragg draws from family stories to portrait a man who could not read but had his wife Ava read him the daily paper. Charlie worked as a roofer, carpenter, and whiskey maker, knew every bend of the Coosa River, and fashioned boats from car hoods. He moved his family twenty-one times in one decade, staying ahead of poverty while raising seven children. When the steel mill ran, Charlie worked there. When it didn't, he labored for bacon or peaches. He paid the doctor who delivered Margaret with a jar of whiskey. Charlie played banjo, danced, and sang when drunk instead of fighting. His funeral drew cars for over a mile along the blacktop. Bragg builds this memorial from love for the man who shaped his mother and the Alabama-Georgia borderlands that shaped them all.
Genres: family-life, american-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: family-legacy, found-family
Setting: Appalachian Foothills, Coosa River
Period: Great Depression
272 pages · Hardcover · Knopf