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 30-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: Lies to my mother
Chapter 30 Summary: New York
Bragg finds his true home with The New York Times: “...to say I searched for stories would be a lie. New York hurled stories at you like Nolan Ryan throws fastballs. All you have to do is catch them, and try not to get your head knocked off” (235). Bragg has particular success writing about the owners of small stores, called bodegas, who are killed during robberies. “People told me it was a ‘real New York story,’ and I was proud of it’ (240).
Chapter 31 Summary: Coming home
Bragg gets a special assignment when a natural disaster hits his home-town. A tornado destroyed a church in Piedmont, Alabama, and Bragg was the best person to cover the story. In the aftermath of the tornado, “The funerals lasted all week in the surrounding towns, and the obituaries filled an entire page in the local newspaper. No one died. People merely said God took them” (243).
Chapter 32 Summary: Dining out with no money, and living with no life
This chapter tells the story of a unique criminal: Gangaram Mahes is a mostly homeless man who dines in restaurants even though he cannot pay the bill and goes to jail for the crime of “stealing” food. He is one of Bragg’s favorite characters among the many he has written about.
Chapter 33 Summary: Buying bodies, eating lobster
Bragg goes back to Haiti and finds that “Not much had changed in three years. The cruelties are still off the scale of sanity” (255). This time, Bragg interviews American soldiers who have come to help pacify Haiti and aid the survivors of the violence. They are ordinary American boys who are overwhelmed by what they find there. When one of them sees photographic evidence of murder and mutilations, he says, “’I knew they killed people...but I didn’t know they done that.’ He looks disgusted, like he needs to hit someone: ‘I never seen nothing like that’” (263).
Chapters 30-33 Analysis
These chapters offer the reader insight into Bragg’s reporting, focusing on the variety of subjects he covered and his involvement in the stories he wrote.
His report on Haiti the second time around takes on greater significance because he is now representing The New York Times, which has been given the title “the paper of record.” Bragg recognizes that his new job gives him the opportunity to make a difference because the readers of The New York Times rely on the paper for accurate information. He can now influence public opinion with his writing
At the end of this period, Bragg gets promoted to “national correspondent. I was going home to cover the South, from the Atlanta Bureau” (263).
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