No one writes about the South like Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg (All Over But the Shoutin). Once again, he lends his voice to the working people of the deep South, and tells the story of a memorable figure in a singular time-a man on a lost stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border. The Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and author of All Over But the Shoutin' continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his mother's childhood in the Appalachian foothills during the Great Depression, and the magnificent story of the man who raised her. Rick Bragg brings his astonishing gift for story-telling to the tale of his grandfather, a man who kept his family one step ahead of poverty and starvation during the decade of the Great Depression. Charlie Bundrum was a roofer, a carpenter, a bootlegger, and a fisherman. He could not read, but he asked his wife, Ava, to read him the paper every day so he would not be ignorant. He was a man who took giant steps in rundown boots, a true hero whom history would otherwise have overlooked. A portrait of an ineradicably memorable figure in a singular time, a moving reflection on home and family and on the author's own connection to a lost stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border, Ava's Man is Rick Bragg at his stunning best.

1150,Lexile.

Reading Counts RC,High School,10,18,Quiz: 32943,Guided reading level: NR.

Accelerated Reader AR,UG,6.1,12.0,67078.