The Prince of Frogtown (Vintage)
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Author: Rick Bragg
- Publisher: Vintage
- Release Date: April 2009
- ISBN-10: 1400032687
- ISBN-13: 9781400032686
- List Price: $14.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryThe final volume of Rick Bragg's bestselling and beloved American saga documents a mesmerizing journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of Rick's youth, to Jacksonville's one-hundred-year-old mill and to Rick's father, the troubled, charismatic hustler coming of age in its shadow. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
You must read this touching, funny memoir!!
Rating:
Pulitzer prize winner Rick Bragg has magnificently written a truly remarkable memoir...touching, engaging, funny and filled with emotion. Preceded by companion Bragg family memoirs, All Over But the Shoutin' and Ava's Man, this poignant book focuses on the author's father. Charles Bragg grew up in the working class Frogtown neighborhood of mill town Jacksonville, Alabama, and his life was marked by alcoholism, poverty and violence. Following his Korean War service, he deteriorated into an abusive, raging alcoholic who eventually left his family when his sons were young. When author, Rick Bragg, marries late in life, he finds himself helping to raise his youngest step-son, a 10 year-old he simply calls "the boy". Polar opposites in terms of personality and upbringing, he struggles to understand this gentle child. Trying to discern how to be a father, the author reexamines the man his father was through interviews with relatives and friends, and reflects on what he has learned. Chapters alternate between Charles Bragg's life and the author's heartwarming, developing relationship with the boy. Rick Bragg is an exceptionally gifted storyteller who tells his story with beautifully crafted sentences that utterly captivated me. He describes in vivid detail the story of the region...the harsh life of those living in the mill villages and the history of the unfortunate mill people in general. I found myself intrigued by the contrast of the father he had with the step-father he was becoming. This book taught me a lot about relationships...between family members, boyhood friends, neighbors and other relatives. I absolutely loved this hilarious, compelling and insightful memoir and I highly recommend it!
wonderful author
Rating:
I have never had a problem in recieving my books in a timely manner. thanks
Rick Bragg's "The Prince Of Frogtown": Compassionate Truth
Rating:
I began reading The Prince of Frogtown the day it arrived and didn't put it down except to sleep (and sleep came much later both nights because I could NOT stop and put this book DOWN). Actually, though I should have felt sleep-deprived I was, instead, buoyed up with enthusiasm over the way Rick Bragg finds the place where compassionate truth lives, and never leaves that place from the beginning of this book until the end.
The way he handles the material in his memoir, tells us that there isn't anything that can't be written about in a way that can help readers find a way to sort through, and come to terms with, just about anything that has, or may, happen.
Now, go and find this book and give it a good try. You may be facing a couple or more very-late-night reading sessions. In my opinion, the lost sleep is more than worth it.
Well done!
Rating:
Great attempt to understand his father! So easy to hold a grudge, so hard to see what drives a person's choices.
Bragging Rights reign supreme
Rating:
Rick Bragg's "All Over but the Shoutin'" is a tribute to his mother, a woman of strong character, a survivor who strives to keep her family intact despite a husband and father whose love of the bottle precludes any possibility of domestic stability. "Ava's Man," Bragg's second book in his trilogy of family,is a character study of his maternal grandparents, in particular Rick's grandfather. In both books Rick's father Charles remains conspicuously in the background; however, in "The Prince of Frogtown" Rick records head on his attempt to discover his father,plumb the depths of his character,which he does with the journalistic flair so much his forte. In a sense Bragg feels he owes his father that much, and it is with a measured fairness he reveals the man who caused considerable pain to his mother, his brothers, and himself.
The stimulus for Bragg's candid and painful journey of discovery comes when he finds himself in a relationship with "the woman" and "the boy." As the relationship deepens, Rick finds himself in the role of a father to "the boy," and he frames "The Prince of Frogtown" with the exploits and experiences of his own boyhood as the son of an alcoholic father juxtaposed with chapters entitled simply "the boy." Because of the boy's sheltered and nurtured childhood, he bewilders Rick, who while trying to understand his father, tries to understand his own role of father to such a child. Early on Bragg states: "I don't know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy." Thus "The Prince of Frogtown" is a book of personal discovery:a better understanding of a man who could have been a father to a son but failed him; the grudging acceptance of a child whose own experiences were so foreign to his own, but worthy of a father's love and respect.
Bragg uses his skill as a journalist to present a fair and unbiased portrayal of a complex but troubled man, his father Charles Bragg. The artist and author Charlie Russell said of alcohol: "If you want to know a man, get him drunk and he'll tip his hand....Remember, I ain't saying booze is good for men, but it boils what's in him to the top." We all have our demons and I came near to accepting Charles as a man unable to control his until Rick graphically reveals his father's heinous act of treachery involving a family pet and Rick's older brother Sam. And as hard as Bragg tries to present his father in an objective, non-judgmental way, for me,any semblance of humanity in the man was erased by this one horrendous, despicable act.
There is no better stylist than Rick Bragg and while his story may at times be uncomfortable for the reader, the story reads movingly and true. No fan of Rick Bragg's will be disappointed in "The Prince of Frogtown."
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