66 pages • 2 hours read
Rick BraggAll Over but the Shoutin'
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 26-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: Lies to my mother
Chapter 26 Summary: Tap-tap
Chapter 26 finds Bragg in Haiti. “I had always wanted to go to Haiti, the same way I’d wanted to touch my mother’s hot iron. The resilience of its people amazed me. But in truth, what drew me to this place was its capacity for evil. A bloody coup gave me reason to come, and write of it” (201).
Bragg covered the aftermath of the coup that toppled Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a true champion of the poor who was, of course, deposed by the rich and their allies in the military. Bragg got to witness his fill of evil among the Haitian poor who were slaughtered in great numbers in especially cruel ways.
Chapter 27 Summary: Snow in a can
This chapter finds Bragg at home in Alabama for Christmas. He feels the tug of home, but he is fully committed to his career and living where the big stories are.
Chapter 28 Summary: The interview for the Ivy League
Bragg’s life goes in an unexpected direction when he applies to become a Nieman Fellow in a special program for journalists at Harvard University. During the interview process, he meets Bill Kovach, a former New York Times editor and reporter who had grown up in Tennessee and was sympathetic to a fellow Southerner. Kovach helped Bragg get into the program and became an important mentor to him.
Chapter 29 Summary: Perfume on a hog
Bragg spends his year at Harvard actually going to classes and asking questions that his fellow students avoid for fear of looking ignorant. He develops a lasting friendship with Bill Kovach, who helps him to develop his writing craft.
Chapters 26-29 Analysis
These chapters cover a very important period in Bragg’s evolution as a journalist. He gets to go to Haiti to cover a big international story. He gets into a highly competitive program at Harvard where he furthers his education and adds significantly to his credentials. After Harvard, Bragg has offers from two of the most important papers, not just in the country, but the world: the L.A. Times and The New York Times. He goes very briefly to work in Los Angeles, but the job is not a good fit. He takes the New York job instead and moves there for the next phase of his career.
He also leaves Harvard with a whole new sense of himself and his role in the world: “...time and again I found myself answering questions from them after class, about the South, about race in the South, about politics and food and relationships between the sexes and...after a while I realized what they meant in the Nieman program about giving back to the university. I was, by my very presence, a walking lab, a field trip. I had seen the meanness and the killing that they read about in their texts about the Third World. I had seen George Wallace, big as life’ (227).
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