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Overview
In this fascinating book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder takes us inside the everyday workings of Northampton, Massachusetts — a place that seems to personify the typical American hometown. Kidder unveils the complex drama behind the seemingly ordinary lives of Northampton's residents. And out of these stories he creates a splendid, startling portrait of a town, in a narrative that gracefully travels among past and present, public and private, joy and sorrow.
A host of real people are alive in these pages: a tycoon with a crippling ailment; a criminal whom the place has beguiled, a genial and merciful judge, a single mother struggling to start a new life at Smith College; and, at the center, a policeman who patrols the streets of his beloved hometown with a stern yet endearing brand of morality — and who is about to discover the peril of spending a whole life in one small place. Their stories take us behind the town's facades and reveal how individuals shape the social conscience of a community. Home Town is an unflinching yet lovingly rendered account of how a traditional American town endures and evolves at the turn of the millenniums.
Synopsis
The bestselling author of The Soul of a New Machine , House , and Among Schoolchildren now shows us what life is like in small-town America today.
Jennifer Langston
Tommy O'Connor is a cop in a town of freaks, feminists, activists, academics, drug dealers, fancy restaurants, wholesome fresh food markets, and colorful street preachers -- all living in what was once the classic American small town.
He grew up in Northampton, Mass., where the all-female Smith College was his playground. He enjoyed a blissful childhood, an Irish family steeped in storytelling and politics, and the firm belief that he would spend his entire life in the place he was born.
Over time, the dying Main Street he remembered was revitalized with art galleries, bookstores, ethnic cuisines, movie theaters. The town of 30,000 -- the same number of souls as in Plato's ideal city-state -- became a place where public officials, felons, and vegetarian anarchists share the same spaces.
Tracy Kidder, whose eye for uncovering drama in unlikely places won the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine , explores just what makes a small town work. He leads a reader though the everyday details of his characters' lives, showing the kindnesses, dramas, and bizarre encounters that bind people to places.
Focusing on a half-dozen characters -- from the overworked mayor to a drug informant who teaches O'Connor the ropes -- Kidder uncovers more than a picture-perfect New England college town. There are drug deals, although they rarely turn violent. There are welfare mothers at Smith, struggling to convince themselves that they aren't stupid and that the college didn't make a mistake.
Home Town includes the eccentrics and homeless people, some of whom were released when the local mental hospital closed down. The most fascinating character is Alan Scheinman, a wealthy developer and rehabilitator of downtown buildings who develops an obsessive-compulsive disorder about cleanliness. But he finds helpmates -- from the clerks at the motor vehicle registry who agree not to "contaminate" his papers by touching them to a stripper who helps bring him back into the normal world.
O'Connor polices the town with tough love. Some days he relishes the circus, and civic-minded residents make police work easier. Other days he catches flak on the street for shaking down a known black drug dealer, because O'Connor is white.
He sees the town's full range -- from lesbians making love in the park to kids on the bubble of going bad. But like other mainstream residents of the town, he values tradition and order in his own life. He remains devoted to his father, his wife, Jean, and the idea of dressing up as Santa Claus and giving out toys at Christmas.
Over the course of the book he faces forks in his own life. He must decide whether to inform on his best childhood friend, a fellow cop who is accused of sexually molesting his daughter. And at the age of 33, he finds himself wondering whether to apply to the FBI, which would advance his career but take him far from home.
Through these characters -- their worries, victories, and everyday meanderings -- Kidder weaves a richly textured tale. With a skillful eye and a keen understanding of place, he also reveals how many different kinds of people can find home in one place.
Jennifer Langston is a reporter for a daily newspaper in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Editorials
Ben Yagoda
What binds Home Town...is a single character, a 33-year-old police sergeant and Hamp native named Tommy O'Connor....[Kidder] made the cop's story a river. The tributaries are historical and demographic digressions about Northampton, and small profiles of a half-dozen other characters....His smart and gently ironic writing is always good company.—The New York Times Book Review
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
...[W]hat is Mr. Kidder's point....Apparently it is to illustrate how the tolerance and cohesiveness of his town embraces all extremes....[He celebrates] the place's diversity....What his book succeeds in doing is bring the dots together again. The picture they form is far from pretty, but it certainly coheres. Shake it and it weeps.—The New York Times
Jennifer Langston
Tommy O'Connor is a cop in a town of freaks, feminists, activists, academics, drug dealers, fancy restaurants, wholesome fresh food markets, and colorful street preachers -- all living in what was once the classic American small town.He grew up in Northampton, Mass., where the all-female Smith College was his playground. He enjoyed a blissful childhood, an Irish family steeped in storytelling and politics, and the firm belief that he would spend his entire life in the place he was born.
Over time, the dying Main Street he remembered was revitalized with art galleries, bookstores, ethnic cuisines, movie theaters. The town of 30,000 -- the same number of souls as in Plato's ideal city-state -- became a place where public officials, felons, and vegetarian anarchists share the same spaces.
Tracy Kidder, whose eye for uncovering drama in unlikely places won the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine , explores just what makes a small town work. He leads a reader though the everyday details of his characters' lives, showing the kindnesses, dramas, and bizarre encounters that bind people to places.
Focusing on a half-dozen characters -- from the overworked mayor to a drug informant who teaches O'Connor the ropes -- Kidder uncovers more than a picture-perfect New England college town. There are drug deals, although they rarely turn violent. There are welfare mothers at Smith, struggling to convince themselves that they aren't stupid and that the college didn't make a mistake.
Home Town includes the eccentrics and homeless people, some of whom were released when the local mental hospital closed down. The most fascinating character is Alan Scheinman, a wealthy developer and rehabilitator of downtown buildings who develops an obsessive-compulsive disorder about cleanliness. But he finds helpmates -- from the clerks at the motor vehicle registry who agree not to "contaminate" his papers by touching them to a stripper who helps bring him back into the normal world.
O'Connor polices the town with tough love. Some days he relishes the circus, and civic-minded residents make police work easier. Other days he catches flak on the street for shaking down a known black drug dealer, because O'Connor is white.
He sees the town's full range -- from lesbians making love in the park to kids on the bubble of going bad. But like other mainstream residents of the town, he values tradition and order in his own life. He remains devoted to his father, his wife, Jean, and the idea of dressing up as Santa Claus and giving out toys at Christmas.
Over the course of the book he faces forks in his own life. He must decide whether to inform on his best childhood friend, a fellow cop who is accused of sexually molesting his daughter. And at the age of 33, he finds himself wondering whether to apply to the FBI, which would advance his career but take him far from home.
Through these characters -- their worries, victories, and everyday meanderings -- Kidder weaves a richly textured tale. With a skillful eye and a keen understanding of place, he also reveals how many different kinds of people can find home in one place.
Jennifer Langston is a reporter for a daily newspaper in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Kristin Eliasberg
Tracy Kidder's Home Town, a detailed, well-researched chronicle of one year in Northampton, Mass., demonstrates that a story's being true does not necessarily make it interesting. The New England town that is Kidder's subject is fairly humdrum, enlivened though it is by the presence of Smith College and by a strong tradition of civic responsibility. But since Kidder's central character, Tommy O'Connor, is a police sergeant with narcotics training, and since O'Connor's closest friend, who is also on the force, is arrested and tried in the course of the book for sexually abusing his own daughter, there is plenty of human drama. Many of the stories are interesting, and Kidder conveys a strong sense of character in each of his portraits. In the end, though, the whole doesn't add up to enough: You leave the book knowing a lot more than you did before about life in Northampton but not having learned much about life.
Kidder speaks of "the genius of the place" -- the town itself functions as one of the characters -- and he includes brief, compassionate portraits of major citizens: the mayor, the morning DJ, a senior judge. One of his strongest is of Alan Scheinman, a middle-aged man with obsessive-compulsive disorder. When Kidder first introduces him, he is walking around with his limbs swathed in plastic bags; during the course of the year, he bravely conquers his disease, taking Prozac and becoming (somewhat) normal. But Kidder isn't entirely convincing when he tries to make the case that the kindliness and neighborliness of the Northamptonites make the town a haven for Scheinman. (Sometimes he seems to be describing a Yankee Mayberry RFD.)
It doesn't help that we aren't able to follow Scheinman's story chronologically. Kidder intersperses segments on the various characters somewhat randomly through the book, fleshing out the narrative with flashbacks, a few potted Northampton history lessons and occasional misty-eyed descriptions of the town and its denizens. We don't get to focus closely enough on any single patch of the broad tapestry to be rewarded with an in-depth story; nor is there enough sweep to provide a breathtaking panorama. The style presents additional problems. When Tommy O'Connor passes his former best friend and neither man acknowledges the other, presumably it's O'Connor who characterizes their encounter as "two ships in the night." But when the judge is described as "looking dapper" and walking "with a jaunty step" within the same sentence, the cliches just seem like authorial laziness.
Kidder's writing is informed by a general notion of goodness rising above adverse circumstances, but because he bounces from story to story without focusing on any particular issue, the narrative doesn't flow. (The sexual-abuse case picks things up early on, but then not much happens with it until well toward the end.) The character of Kidder himself doesn't provide a unifying factor, either. He is virtually absent from the book, occasionally to odd effect: Tommy O'Connor often seems to be talking to himself as he drives his cruiser.
Ultimately, the book resembles the town. It's nice, but it's not very exciting. -- Salon
Sanford J. Unger
...Kidder does not claim to have looked for anything representative of a grand phenomenon....[H]e has sought merely to tell a good story in a way that teaches us something. That he has done. — WQ: The Wilson QuarterlyPublishers Weekly
Kidder (The Soul of the New Machine) applies his hands-on style of journalism to an examination of small-town America--specifically Northampton, Mass., home of Smith College--through assembling a group portrait of some of its everyday citizens. His central premise--"if you do all your growing up in the same small place, you don't shed identities, you accumulate them"--is chiefly demonstrated through the story of Tommy, a local cop. He's first seen as a mischievous teenage townie, an "exuberant youth" wooing his high school sweetheart, living in a white clapboard house. As Tommy grows into adulthood, Kidder shows his life becoming more complex, as when a childhood friend and fellow cop is suspected of child abuse. Because Kidder's writing style is so descriptive, it abridges easily into self-contained observational episodes, and reader Krall, though animated in his character depictions, preserves Kidder's overriding tone of earnestness. Based on the 1999 Random House hardcover. (May) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
Northampton, MA, like any other U.S. city, is a mix of natives, newcomers, eccentrics, and working people who all contribute to the rich fabric that makes each town unique. Pulitzer Prize winner Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine) portrays the larger story of Northampton through the details of several people's lives. Through native Tommy O'Connor, a winsome boy from a large family who grows up to be a policeman, Kidder weaves the lives of other people such as Laura Baumeister, a single mom struggling to graduate from Smith College, and Alan Scheinman, a wealthy yet peculiar lawyer determined to overcome his obsessive-compulsive disorder. The author crafts the rather objective reporting of his subjects' actions to sound like a work of fiction. It is his skill at subtly blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction that gives this otherwise straightforward account a multilayered and endearing quality. Reader Daamien Krall masterfully adds distinctive touches to distinguish the many characters, making this an intriguing selection that will prompt listeners to read the book in its entirety.--Susan McCaffrey, Haslett H.S., MI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\School Library Journal
YA-Kidder presents a masterful guided tour of Northampton, MA, which dates back to the Puritans and then became a mill town during the Northeast's industrial boom. It suffered from urban blight during the blossoming of suburbia, but has recently managed a high-end renaissance. The author's goal is to show readers the community through the eyes of its citizens, particularly a young, straight-arrow police officer who sees not only the plush Northampton of yuppies and Smith College professors, but also the projects. Tommy seems to know everyone in town, from the hardworking female mayor to a drug dealer turned informant who teaches him the ins and outs of the crack business. There is also the town eccentric, a lawyer and real-estate mogul who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Teens will be especially interested in Laura Baumeister, a Smith College student in her 20s on a special scholarship. Together she and her young son must learn to adjust to life at the prestigious institution while maneuvering through the unforgiving welfare system. The lives of these and many other citizens intertwine to provide a moving picture of life in a small New England city.-Jane Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Ben Yagoda
What binds Home Town...is a single character, a 33-year-old police sergeant and Hamp native named Tommy O'Connor....[Kidder] made the cop's story a river. The tributaries are historical and demographic digressions about Northampton, and small profiles of a half-dozen other characters....His smart and gently ironic writing is always good company.— The New York Times Book Review
Sanford J. Unger
...Kidder does not claim to have looked for anything representative of a grand phenomenon....[H]e has sought merely to tell a good story in a way that teaches us something. That he has done.— WQ: The Wilson Quarterly