Summary of Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin'

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 My parents were born in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Georgia, a place where gray mists hid the tops of low, deep-green mountains. It was a place where redbone and bluetick hounds flashed through the pines as they chased possums into the sacks of old men in frayed overalls.

#2 The religion held even though the piano players went to music school and learned to read notes, and even though new churches became glass and steel monstrosities that looked like they had just touched down from Venus. It held even though the more prosperous preachers started to tack the pretentious title of Doctor in front of their name.

#3 I had never been inside a church in my life until I was a father, until I needed The Cross. I would ask to see my momma in some of those calls, but anything she had for me had been beaten and starved out of her a long time ago.

#4 I was 16 when I went to see my father. I was not afraid of him anymore. I was not helpless anymore, not some child hiding under the bed. I was a lot like him, he had told me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669385882

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Insights on Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin'

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

My parents were born in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Georgia, a place where gray mists hid the tops of low, deep-green mountains. It was a place where redbone and bluetick hounds flashed through the pines as they chased possums into the sacks of old men in frayed overalls.

#2

The religion held even though the piano players went to music school and learned to read notes, and even though new churches became glass and steel monstrosities that looked like they had just touched down from Venus. It held even though the more prosperous preachers started to tack the pretentious title of Doctor in front of their name.

#3

I had never been inside a church in my life until I was a father, until I needed The Cross. I would ask to see my momma in some of those calls, but anything she had for me had been beaten and starved out of her a long time ago.

#4

I was 16 when I went to see my father. I was not afraid of him anymore. I was not helpless anymore, not some child hiding under the bed. I was a lot like him, he had told me.

#5

I remember my father, who was supposed to be a still-young man, looking like the walking dead, not just old but damaged, poisoned, used up, and thrown in a corner to die. I thought that the man I would see would be the trim, swaggering, high-toned man of my mother’s photo album.

#6

My father tried to be my father for the next few hours. He asked me if I liked school, if I had ever gotten any better at math, and if I had a girlfriend. He never said he was sorry or that he wished things had turned out differently.

#7

I was given a library by my father, who did not know who Shakespeare was, but he knew I liked pretty books. I did not love Shakespeare, but I still have those books.

#8

The author’s father fought in the Korean War, and while he did not experience the dead reaching out to him, he did see the world through narrow eyes. He only saw the world through the eyes of those who were close to him, and did not want to change that.

#9

His father had never been cold, but in Korea, it was winter all the time.