The lot of the poor white in the Deep South has been a frequent theme for fiction - by Erskine Caldwell et alii - but this is factual memoir, by a writer who from stark poverty has gone on to become a successful journalist with the New York Times. It is almost a stereotyped scenario - the father shiftless and failing to provide properly for his wife and two sons, the mother devoted, pious and hard-working. Bragg progressed on to High School and later began to earn good money, but his lifelong regret is that he never managed to buy his mother a home of her own - all her life, she lived in other people's houses. Well written and never self-pitying, the book is something more than a documentary slice of life.