This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life for the American margin may be the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg’s father, a hard-drinking guy with a murderous temper as well as the habit of running out on the individuals who needed him many.

But at the center of the soaring memoir is Bragg’s mother, who have went eighteen years with out a new outfit so that her sons could have school clothes and picked other people’s cotton in order that her kids wouldn’t have to live on welfare by itself. Evoking these lives – and the country that shaped and nourished them – with artistry, credibility, and compassion, Rick Bragg brings hone the like and suffering that lie in the centre of every family members.

The effect is unforgettable.