Home town
By: Tracy Kidder.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 349
Subjects: Police -- Massachusetts -- Northampton -- Biography; City and town life -- United States -- Case studies; Northampton (Mass.) -- Biography; Northampton (Mass.) -- Social conditions; Northampton (Mass.) -- History
Description: "In this 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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [339]-349).