66 pages • 2 hours read
Rick BraggAll Over but the Shoutin'
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 23-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: Lies to my mother
Chapter 23 Summary: Paradise
In Chapter 23, Bragg moves forward with the story of his career, telling us about his move to Florida to write for the St. Petersburg Times, then “consistently, year after year, one of the top ten newspapers in America” (174). There he covered southwest Florida, including the Everglades, and got to write a story he considered a “dream come true: They sent me to cover an alligator hunt” (177).
Bragg also covers a truly tragic story about Siamese twins who die. He learns that for him, journalistic objectivity is “impossible” In cases like this one.
Chapter 24 Summary: Miami, in madness
In this chapter, Bragg’s assignment changes so that he is covering Miami, which is a reporter’s dream town because so much exciting and terrible news originates there. He goes with a reporter friend to cover a riot in a black neighborhood and faces danger and fear unlike anything he has experienced before. Rioters throw rocks breaking their car window and hitting Bragg in the head. “I do not want to believe it, but I think we might have died there...” (189).
Chapter 25 Summary: Eating life
Bragg continues to find good stories in Miami and to enhance his reputation as a reporter and a writer.
Chapters 23-25 Analysis
The account of the alligator hunt in Chapter 23 is the funniest part of the book. Bragg is out with the alligator hunters who use a harpoon to spear the gators. He is jumping from one boat to another when he falls into the water amongst the riled-up reptiles. “The photographer, Walles, later explained to me that he felt obligated to cover the news, and for a few minutes I was the news. I could see the headline: GATOR EATS REPORTER: ALL POSSUM TROT MOURNS. Then, a year later: WALLES WINS PULITZER PRIZE” (179).
Bragg saves the rock that hit him during the riot in Miami for a time but eventually discards it. He does not want to remember the abject fear and closeness to death that he felt at the time.
In Miami and its environs Bragg goes where other reporters would not, including among desperate homeless people and hopeless migrant workers. “The truth was that I was elbow-deep in some of the darkest stories of my life” (193). He has become by this time a true “misery” reporter.
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