Booklist and Notes

Booklist and Notes George Brosi Bragg, Rick. Ava's Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 304 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $25.00. Rick Bragg (b. 1959) has carved out a journalism career for himself writing features mostly about people who share his working class origins. He started with papers in his native Alabama, and now he is a national correspondent for The New York Times and has a Pulitzer to his credit for his reporting on the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing. In 1997 he told the story of his mother in the book, All Over But the Shouting. It drew rave reviews—Pat Conroy called it "one of the best books I've ever read"—and was a best seller. His collection of personal profiles, published first in papers, called Somebody Told Me (2000), was equally well received. Ava's Man has already drawn the unique kind of praise his previous efforts saw. The book takes this title because the author knew the widow of the subject of this biography but not the subject, Charlie Bundrum, his maternal grandfather, who died in 1958, a year before the author was born. Bundrum lived in the foothills of the Appalachians, near the Alabama-Georgia border, and worked primarily as a roofer, but also as a carpenter, a moonshiner and a fisherman. Bragg presents Bundrum completely, without glossing over his rough edges—the kind that brought him to knock his grown son unconscious with a single punch to the face. "In this pungent paean to his grandfather, Bragg also chronicles a vanished South that, like the once-wild Coosa River Charlie liked to ply in homemade boats, is becoming too tamed to accommodate those who would carve out a proud if hardscrabble living on its margins."—Publishers Weekly. "In creating an indelible portrait of his grandfather, Bragg also brings alive a particular time and place showing us just how much we've lost as we've made progress."—Booklist. Harvey, Steven. Boundfor Shady Grove. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 157 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $24.95. This is an eclectic collection of essays about traditional mountain music. It includes, for example, a piece that describes in detail the creation of a handmade banjo, another on a trip to England to explore the origins of this music, one on a pawn shop that specializes in musical instruments and firearms, and another on a banjo contest. 98 The author was born in 1949, in Dodge City, Kansas, and received his doctorate from the University of Virginia. He has been an English professor at Young Harris College in North Georgia since 1976. This is his fourth essay collection in book form, following a volume of poetry. Hickam, Homer. Sky of Stone: A Memoir. New York: Delacorte Press/Random House, 2001. 336 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $24.95. This is the third and final book in a trilogy of memoirs from a NASA engineer who grew up in a West Virginia coal camp. The first, Rocket Boys, was a number one New York Times bestseller, later made into the successful Hollywood movie, October Sky. This book, Sky of Stone, takes place in the Summer of 1961 when the author has returned home after his first year at Virginia Tech. "Sonny" as the author calls himself, is working at the coal mine his father runs for a large company. The title comes from how the sky appears when miners first emerge from underground. The plot is enlivened by Sonny's difficult relationship with his distant father, the impending break-up of his parents' marriage, an older woman who becomes a love interest and an investigation of Sonny's father's complicity in a methane explosion that killed a friend. "This concluding volume has the feel of literary durability about it, even more than the muchballyhooed Rocket Boys."—Kirkus Reviews. Homer Hickam (b. 1943) was born in Coalwood, West Virginia, received a BS from VPI, served in Vietnam as Second Lieutenant, and then worked for the Army Missile Command and NASA in Huntsville, Alabama, until his recent retirement. Kelsay, Michael. Too Close to Call. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. 274 pages. Hardback...