Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg Paperback - 2001

First line

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

From the jacket flap

With his bestselling All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg gave us memorable stories of his own childhood. In Somebody Told Me, he offers the best of his work as a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist writing the remarkable stories of others.
For twenty years, Bragg has focused his efforts on the common man. So while some of these stories are about people whose names we know-such as Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drowned her two sons-most are people whose names we've never heard, people who have survived tornadoes and swamps, racism and bombs. In incisive, unadorned prose that is nonetheless strikingly beautiful, these pieces rise above journalism to become literature and show the triumph of the human spirit.

Media reviews

"The stories in Somebody Told Me are so unbelievably good, they will burn a hole in your bookshelf."
--St. Petersburg Times

"[E]loquent... memorable... [E]ngages us as readers and poignantly conveys the impact of small and large events on everyday life."
--The New York Times Book Review

"He's one of the vital voices in contemporary American writing."
--Willie Morris

Citations

• Entertainment Weekly, 09/14/2001, Page 85
• Kliatt, 01/01/2002, Page 22