Double post, oh no! Ironic, considering that I reprimanded SOCL for the same thing in my first post in this pair. For an AP English class I had to read All Over but the Shoutin' and The Color of Water, both of which have their high and low points, both of which are biographies. The Color of Water, the better of the two in my opinion, is a black man's tribute to his white mother; she never spoke of her past, never spoke of her side of the family, raised twelve amazing children, and didn't care at all about the color of any one's skin from when she was young on. James McBride yanked the tale from his mother bit by bit, and wrote her exploit movingly, relying more on the quirks of life in his writing than any distinctive style. All Over but the Shoutin', by Rick Bragg, is almost the polar opposite of the other book. The autobiography of Rick Bragg, it details his life in the South and his own mother's sacrifices for he and his two brothers. It ranges from Alabama to Florida to New York to California, following Bragg's career as a newspaper reporter, and his ultimate return to his family. It is, without a doubt, the better written of the two, but the less compelling of the two stories; quite frankly life as a reporter, even a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who interviewed the dead and dying and living dead, is not all that interesting the majority of the time. I recommend both books, though I would warn any potential reader that Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin' is what I'd call a "thick" read, where the reader knows that it is well-written and that they enjoy it to a certain extent, but finds themselves timing how long it take to read each page a despairing mildly at the two hundred and twelve pages left. (For the record, the length of a book rarely deters me; I was through with Deathly Hallows in two days, and it's twice as long as All Over but the Shoutin'.)