This autobiography recounts how Bragg, brought up in poverty in the deep South, ended up a Pulitzer Prize-winning report for the New York Times. The book is an account of growing up in an impoverished, ragged white Alabama family - poor to the point that even nigras would bring them food. He writes of his deprived yet hilarious childhood in the 1960s, of his uncomplaining mother's back-breaking labour, and of his father's poisonous behaviour towards her and how he himself managed to escape the treadmill of hopelessness that his two brothers walk today.