THE SPECKLED BEAUTY

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author puts a fresh spin on a classic theme: A wounded man rescues a wounded pet that in turn rescues him.

Bragg’s engaging tale of his life with an unruly Australian shepherd is the latest of his tragicomic memoirs of his family, which began with All Over but the Shoutin’ and continued with Ava’s Man and The Prince of Frogtown. Together, these books comprise one of the finest—and certainly the most comprehensive—group portraits of a poor, White Southern clan to appear in the past quarter-century. This installment finds the 60-year-old author back in Calhoun County, living in his mother’s basement (working “exactly eleven steps from where I go to sleep”) after bouts with pneumonia, heart and kidney failure, and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that led to “chemo brain.” Lonely and depressed, Bragg took in an anarchic, one-eyed, badly injured dog named Speck that had run wild in woods and pastures but stuck with him. With typically deadpan wit, the author writes, “This did not mean I was his master, merely his alibi, coconspirator, bailsman, and the driver of his ambulance.” Speck tried to herd a one-ton truck, picked a fight with a cottonmouth, and acted as if “every wayward possum was a sign of the end times.” But when Speck reveled in simple joys on his mother’s farm, Bragg found that “to see a living thing that happy” was worth the difficulties. Their story ends with a few narrative threads dropped—one involving Bragg’s brother Sam, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer during the writing of this book and died after its completion—but the abrupt conclusion doesn’t diminish an estimable cycle of books. Let’s hope they will someday appear in uniform editions with an introduction that would help readers see them all in context.

A celebrated Southern memoirist delivers a spirited book about a hell-raising dog and his effect on the author’s life.