Rick Bragg: All over but the Shoutin'

The author, Rick Bragg, won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996, for his work with The New York Times. Rick Bragg recently spoke in front of Alabama's state legislature. The Gadsden Times reported this: “Remember My People,” was Bragg's topic and even though he spun yarns and told good natured tales, there was an edge to his voice several times as he defined just who his people are and how they can be taken advantage of by the powerful. “I know that lucky people, rich people, comfortable people don't need a lot of help,” said Bragg, whose best selling book “All Over But the Shoutin'” is partly the story of growing up dirt poor — “I come from several generations of poor white trash in northeast Alabama,” he said proudly — and his incredibly strong mother who raised him and his two brothers while married to an abusive, alcoholic father. “But I am not asking you to give my people, working people, anything they don't earn,” he said. “But I believe that every society, every great society really is judged by how it treats its working people and poor. See that Gadsden Time piece here. Rick Bragg also wrote these interesting books: The Most They Ever Had, The Prince of Frogtown (Vintage), Ava's Man, and Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg.

Greg Lawrence: Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

The Wall Street Journal recently juxtaposed two books on the same topic:

William Kuhn's "Reading Jackie" and Greg Lawrence's "Jackie as Editor" are seemingly the same book—chronological accounts of her 19-year career at the publishers Viking and Doubleday—but they are actually very different. Mr. Kuhn's is heavy on hagiography and analysis, Mr. Lawrence's is an energetically reported and crisply written story of a whip-smart, middle-age working woman who marshaled wits, charm, steely will and, of course, unmatched connections to make a new life for herself. In 1975, Jackie (as both authors choose to call her) found herself stranded in a 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after the death of her second husband, the coarse billionaire Aristotle Onassis. Two debonair godfathers rescued her from idleness and depression. The first was Tom Guinzburg, an old friend who had inherited Viking from his father and who invited Jackie to be a consulting editor for $10,000 a year. When that job ended badly, John Sargent, another charmer, brought her to Doubleday, where she had a long and productive run.

Read that article, in full, here. The Huffington Post also covered the book and author: Lawrence, just one of the many authors whose careers she touched, says that one of the most revealing anecdotes he's ever heard about Jackie came from a friend, editor Joe Armstrong, who visited her in Martha's Vineyard less than a year before she died. "I remember in her living room she had all these books," Armstrong told Lawrence. "And she said, `These are my other best friends.'" Read that blog post here.