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What: “All Over But The Shoutin’ ” by Rick Bragg, Pantheon Books (Random House)

Price: $25

This work of nonfiction qualifies for review in this space because its author started as a sportswriter. In other words, just about anything qualifies for review in this space.

Rick Bragg is now a national correspondent for the New York Times, headquartered in Atlanta. He won a Pulitzer prize for feature writing in 1996. In sports parlance, he had a cup of coffee on this paper in 1993, but the relationship on our news staff lasted less than a month and he headed for the even brighter lights of Times Square. Our loss, as it turns out.

His book is a story about growing up in the South in an area of Alabama where being called white trash might have been a step up. In many ways, this is an “Angela’s Ashes” read-alike, but with a few more meals. It is a story of poverty, of a father who drank too much, contributed too little and left a lot; of a mother who raised three ornery sons and, despite all odds, kept them mostly on the straight and narrow.

The best image in the book is Bragg as a child, being dragged along by his mother in an open sack while she worked the fields. Talk about tough day-care.

The book has something for anybody who is interested in the rough trails of life, especially when they eventually lead to nice endings. Bragg’s nice ending is winning the Pulitzer and buying his mother a house, one where things like faucets and toilets actually work.

The attraction of the book is the writing. For somebody with almost no formal education, who learned to put words together by describing off-tackle slants in prep football games, Bragg has a masterful command of the language. A quick sample: “I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.”

This is recommended reading. And if you have trouble paying money for work done by stuffy new guys from the New York Times--or maybe stuffy news guys in general--think of Bragg as a former sportswriter.