Ava's Man (2008)

Turns out it wasn't ''All Over But the Shoutin''' for Rick Bragg. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter follows up his justly acclaimed 1997 memoir about his mother with Ava's Man, the equally well-told story of his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum. A carpenter and roofer, Bundrum spent his life working on other people's houses but could never afford to build one for his own family, whom he moved all over Georgia and Alabama in the '30s and '40s. He supplemented his income by making moonshine, and as Bragg notes dryly, ''he never sold a sip -- not one sip -- that he did not test with his own liver.'' Although alcohol abuse hastened Bundrum's death in 1958, his grandson writes, ''when the spirit -- or the likker -- moved him, he was one of the finest storytellers who ever lived.'' The same honor applies to Bragg.

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