Rick Bragg 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. Bragg's father is a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most. But at the center of this memoir--and the family--is Bragg's mother, who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons would have school clothes and picked other people's cotton so that her children wouldn't have to live on welfare alone.
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