Redbirds: Memories from the South

Redbirds: Memories from the South by Bragg, Rick. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781860463969.

This autobiography recounts how Bragg, brought up in poverty in the deep South, ended up a Pulitzer Prize-winning report for the "New York Times". The book is an account of growing up in an impoverished, ragged white Alabama family - poor to the point that even "nigras" would bring them food. He writes of his deprived yet hilarious childhood in the 1960s, of his uncomplaining mothers back-breaking labour, and of his fathers poisonous behaviour towards her and how he himself managed to escape the treadmill of hopelessness that his two brothers walk today.