[In the following review, Walton praises Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin', describing the memoir as "the kind of book that causes us to see ourselves more clearly because it corrects and heightens our vision."]

There is an old saying among African-Americans to the effect that any white man who lives in poverty does so by choice. This saying is based on the premise that being born with white skin is so great an advantage as to determine a successful life. The colloquialism for disadvantaged Caucasians, "white trash," indicates that the nation as a whole holds these people responsible for their station as well. "Trash" means something without value, something unworthy of our attention and barely worthy of our contempt.

In his sad, beautiful, funny and moving memoir, All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg gives us a report from the forgotten heart of "white trash" America, a sort of Pilgrim's Progress or Up From Slavery about how a clever and determined young man outwitted fate. The story he tells, of white suffering and disenfranchisment, is one too seldom heard. It is as if a descendant of one of the hollow-eyed children from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had stepped out of a photograph to tell his own story, to narrate an experience that even Agee could not penetrate because he was not himself "trash."

Bragg, like the boys and girls around him in isolated and impoverished northeastern Alabama, did not choose to be poor. Along with them, he was intended in the rigid hierarchy of American life to be a logger, or to work in a pulp mill, or to drink and carouse and engage in the sort of small-scale criminal activity that leads to a fair portion of your life being spent behind bars. Instead he became, by his mid-30's, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times. All Over but the Shoutin' is the story of that rise.

There is an early picture in the story that serves as an imaginative metaphor for the whole: Bragg recalls sitting on a gunny sack at the age of 2 or 3 and being dragged through a field by his mother. It is only years later that he realizes she had been working, picking cotton—degrading and backbreaking labor that could only have been made more onerous by the presence of a toddler. "The tall woman is wearing a man's britches and a man's old straw hat, and now and then she looks back over her shoulder to smile at the 3-year-old boy whose hair is almost as purely white as the bolls she picks, who rides the back of the six-foot-long sack like a magic carpet." Turning hard scrabble into a pleasant memory was something Margaret Bragg would do for her boy again and again as he grew.

Her sacrifice and suffering form the core of Bragg's experience and so of this book. How did she let him dream in the face of such discouragement, how did she protect his spirit from being broken, as so many others were? The father of the family, a hard-drinking and violent ne'er-do-well, is never more than intermittently involved in Bragg's life, and is gone for good by the time the boy is in elementary school. His brothers grow up to lives very different from his: Sam, several years older, is forced by circumstance to leave school early and begin what will be a life of working with his hands and back to try to make up, economically, for the absence of the father (Bragg relates, heartbreakingly, how Sam was made to "work off" Federal entitlements like school lunches by callous teachers and school administrators); his younger brother, Mark, falls into the pernicious Appalachian life style of alcoholism, making illegal liquor and being permanently situated on the wrong side of the law. This is the psychological and emotional landscape Bragg looks back on as he reconstructs his life.

Bragg is painfully honest about his feelings of insecurity and inadequacy as he moved among his "betters"—"the old-money white Southerners who ran things, who treated the rest of the South like beggars with muddy feet who were about to track up their white shag carpeting." He writes of a thwarted school love affair: "They named the sections of the divided classroom after birds. She was a Cardinal, one of the children of the well-to-do who studied from nice books with bright pictures, and I was a Jaybird, one of the poor or just plain dumb children who got what was left after the good books were passed out…. The teacher—and I will always, always remember this—told me I would be much more comfortable with my own kind. I was 6, but even at 6 you understand what it means to be told you are not good enough to sit with the well scrubbed."

In a time when Bragg's family was at rock bottom, without food, a black boy from down the road brought them some corn his mother had sent over. "In the few contacts we had with them as children, we had thrown rocks at them … I would like to say that we came together after the little boy brought us that food, that we learned about and from each other, but that would be a lie." In the brutal realities faced by those like Bragg who were not "white," not really, poor whites chose not to band together with blacks but to instead live in "two separate, distinct states." One would have liked to see even more commentary on this critical topic from so honest and thoughtful an observer.

After very limited college experience and very good luck (Bragg, at the age of 18, gets a job at a local paper when the first choice decides to remain employed at Kentucky Fried Chicken), he commences a rapid climb through the ranks of the newspaper trade, starting as a sports reporter in small towns in Alabama and getting a steady succession of better jobs through his plucky Ragged Dick combination of large talent and sheer will. Bragg moves to a new city just about every year for 10 years, moving ever farther away from the strict but sure comforts of his family back home and ever farther into "enemy territory," the polite and at best indifferent precincts of the white middle and upper classes.

From the vantage point of adulthood, Bragg contemplates "how I got over" the extent of his mother's accomplishment in not letting him be broken. He spends much of his rise scheming and saving to buy her a house. Gradually the reader becomes aware that what Bragg is really trying to buy for her is a place in the world, a place from which she doesn't have to move, a place where Mrs. Bragg can, for once, sit still, and be unconcerned with practical exigencies, be insulated from whatever random difficulties and humiliations the given day may bring. It is this sort of life-or-death urgency that gives his tale its majesty and power.

Bragg is showing us a place we have not seen before, not quite like this. And he is joining an elite group of American writers who have used the literature of childhood to affect our understanding of our society, standing in the tradition of Huck and Tom, Holden Caulfield and Dorothy Allison's Bone Boatwright, of Richard Wright and Harry Crews, those hard-headed but bighearted malcontents who ricochet through the land making trouble and keeping the rest of us honest.

There are books that let us see clearly a time and place; there are books that allow us to feel that we are experiencing with truth and accuracy the life of another person. Rick Bragg has written the kind of book that causes us to see ourselves more clearly because it corrects and heightens our vision, and through this vision we see for the first time the humanity of others and are able to imagine, if only for a moment, that unbridgeable divides can somehow, because of what we have learned we have in common, be surmounted.