Book Description
Home Town - In this splendid book, one of
America's masters of nonfiction takes us home--into Hometown,
U.S.A., the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, and into the
extraordinary, and the ordinary, lives that people live
there. As Tracy Kidder reveals how, beneath its amiable
surface, a small town is a place of startling complexity, he
also explores what it takes to make a modern small city a
success story. Weaving together compelling stories of
individual lives, delving into a rich and varied past, moving
among all the levels of Northampton's social hierarchy,
Kidder reveals the sheer abundance of life contained within a
town's narrow boundaries. Does the kind of small town that
many Americans came from, and long for, still exist? Kidder
says yes, although not quite in the form we may imagine. A
book about civilization in microcosm, Home Town
makes us marvel afresh at the wonder of individuality,
creativity, and civic order--how a disparate group of
individuals can find common cause and a code of values that
transforms a place into a home. And this book makes you feel
you live there.