[In the following review, Lott describes Rick Bragg's writing in his memoir, All Over but the Shoutin', as self-conscious, asserting that the work "suffers from precisely what has made him such a fine reporter: the book reads as though it were a feature.]

Regular readers of The New York Times know the work of Rick Bragg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose piercing snapshots of Americans, from the Susan Smith murder trial in South Carolina to the Oklahoma bombing to street life in Harlem, have graced The Times's pages since 1994.

But Mr. Bragg's memoir, All Over but the Shoutin', suffers from precisely what has made him such a fine reporter: the book reads as though it were a feature. Obviously the form has served him well for writing that is measured in column inches, but here it grows weary and, paradoxically enough for a memoir, awfully self-conscious when run into the hundreds of pages, and when the focus is himself.

At once a tribute to his long-suffering mother and a chronicle of his rise from profound poverty in his native Alabama to his present post as a national correspondent for The Times, Mr. Bragg's first book of nonfiction affords us few glimpses into the inner life of the man that aren't jampacked with a kind of cocky, colloquial imagery, the effect being that he doesn't seem to trust the bare truth of his material—his own life—to be moving enough, instead defaulting to heavy-handed writing that draws attention to itself rather than to the matter at hand.

Of his dying father's belated interest in eternal salvation, Mr. Bragg writes that "as the sickness squeezed his lungs he began to hope that Jesus was more than just a 50-cent mail-order picture enshrined in a dime store frame on the hallway wall, that salvation was the trick card he could play right at the end and stay in the money." Of his desire to work the Miami beat for The St. Petersburg Times, he observes that it was "a reporter's nirvana, a place where smash-and-grab robbers stalked tourists with chunks of concrete, where whole skyscrapers stood on foundations of drug money, where the Tontons Macoute of Haiti reached across the Florida Straits to kill political enemies, and old men with hatred infusing every cell of their bodies played soldier in the Glades, dreaming of the day they could kill Castro." At the sentence level the punchy tone and shiny litanies work fine, but line up too many of them on too many pages, and one finds the need for room to breathe, to look simply and deeply at a moment or desire in search of its heart, its portent.

This is because much of the story is compelling in and of itself, and worth hearing. The first half of the book portrays Mr. Bragg's mother as a beautiful and heartbroken woman whose life is spent picking cotton and ironing others' clothes, and who has been left to raise her three sons alone save for those few instances when her husband suddenly appears, sometimes sober, sometimes not, but always for the worse.

Here some of the most tender scenes appear, scenes in which the writing is momentarily stripped of itself, letting breathe beautiful, if brief, instants of perfect clarity and depth. "She would pick May Pops for us," he writes of his mother and her efforts to entertain the boys with the available world, "and show us how the tiny stem inside looked just like a woman dancing if you twirled it between your fingers. She taught us that the hooting of owls and the cries of night birds are bad luck, and showed us how to find the best worms for fishing by looking under rotten planks."

The image that emerges is of a proud, determined and basically happy family held together by their staid and devoted mother, even in the face of an economic misery so deep that the black people down the road stop by now and again with the gift of leftover corn, this in a time and place overshadowed by the larger-than-life countenance of George Wallace.

The second half of the book kicks in, and this sense of self-consciousness—of writing about yourself as though you were the subject of a feature story—takes over with a vengeance. With the exception of a few backward glances, including the genuinely moving account of taking his mother from Possum Trot, Ala., to the Pulitzer Prize awards luncheon in Manhattan, Mr. Bragg spends much of the rest of the book regaling us with stories of his adventures in the paper trade, from his scrappy days reporting on stock car races and hometown football games, to various beats with various Southern newspapers, then to his prestigious Nieman fellowship year at Harvard, finally winding up with that Pulitzer at The New York Times.

But perhaps what seems most self-conscious about this end of the memoir is that the book becomes increasingly a kind of Rick Bragg reader, the author lifting lines, even whole pages, from various articles he has written through the years, holding them up to the reader like trophies. Of his first trip to Haiti to report for The St. Petersburg Times, in 1991, he writes: "The more I read about Haiti's history, the more fascinated I became. I learned that Haiti was rich once, a lush French colony with 95 percent of its people in chains. 'In 1791,' I wrote, 'a voodoo priest named Boukman drank the blood of a sacrificed pig….'"

Mr. Bragg then goes on for much of the next two pages giving a pocket history of Haiti from no more impeccable a resource than himself. It's as if, finally, the articles he has written serve as stand-ins for his own life, leaving the core of the book—who is this man?—strangely insular and hollow at once.

At one point during Mr. Bragg's year at Harvard, his mentor, Bill Kovach, a former editor at The New York Times, gave him some prudent advice. "He told me I had a gift," Mr. Bragg writes, "which I guess anyone wants to hear even if it ain't noways true, but he also told me, more or less gently, that I could use some work. He told me I crowded too many pretty lines into my stories, that I needed space between them."

Though Mr. Bragg admits in the next line to trying to fix this problem, he still hasn't whittled away enough—at least for a memoir, a form in which the words that make the man must be stripped away by none other than the man himself to reveal the soul therein. Curiously enough, the missing figure in this entire endeavor is Rick Bragg, too shrouded in his craft to let us see inside.