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As an amateur family historian I have a passion for finding the stories of our ancestors and using them to bring those people back to life. Rick Bragg, with this tribute to a grandfather he never met, has succeeded in doing this in a manner that far exceeds anything I could ever aspire to. Nobody in his family would tell him about Charlie Bundrum, his maternal grandfather. From what little they let slip from time to time, he knew that they weren't ashamed of him. It mystified Bragg that in a family of such prolific storytellers, everyone was profoundly mum on this one subject. He began to question everyone he knew about this mysterious grandfather or his and slowly came to realize that the sheer presence of this man was so powerful that his family still couldn't bear to think that he was gone decades after his passing. "What kind of man was this," Bragg wondered, "who was so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?

"A man like that...probably deserves a book."

And so began Bragg's efforts to resurrect his grandfather, an effort so successful that I, a reader with no connection to his family or the life and times he led, felt that I knew him intimately and at the end I, too, wept unashamedly for this man who left this earth about the time I was born. There is no better example of the family historian's art than this. Maybe it doesn't list all the dates that places where people were born and died but it raises the dead, and you cannot ask for anything more than that.

I once said that Rick Bragg was my favorite living southern author. After saying that, I paused and added that I wasn't even sure that the words favorite and living were all that necessary.

This book has my highest recommendation.

My thanks to the folks at the On the Southern Literary Trail group for giving me the opportunity to read and discuss this and many other fine books.