SOURCE: "Up from Southern Poverty, into a Wider World," in The New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1997, p. C16.

[In the following review, Lott describes Rick Bragg's writing in his memoir, All Over but the Shoutin', as self-conscious, asserting that the work "suffers from precisely what has made him such a fine reporter: the book reads as though it were a feature.]

Regular readers of The New York Times know the work of Rick Bragg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose piercing snapshots of Americans, from the Susan Smith murder trial in South Carolina to the Oklahoma bombing to street life in Harlem, have graced The Times's pages since 1994.

But Mr. Bragg's memoir, All Over but the Shoutin', suffers from precisely what has made him such a fine reporter: the book reads as though it were a feature. Obviously the form has served him well for writing that...