Home Town [Hardcover]

Tracy Kidder (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Northampton, Massachusetts, boasts a rich history that dates back to the 17th century. It is home to Mount Holyoke, which has been climbed by Charles Dickens and Henry James (among others), and to Sylvia Plath's alma mater, Smith College. It has always been the quintessential New England town, while becoming in recent years a politically progressive small city, whose population of 30,000 has WASPs rubbing elbows with lesbians, immigrants, students, and the homeless. Driven by a narrative force comparable to that of the best fiction, Home Town is a remarkable evocation of small-town life at the end of the 20th century.

Probing beneath Northampton's friendly exterior, Pulitzer-winning author Tracy Kidder uncovers the town's many layers, from the lowest to the highest rungs of society, and renders a portrait of Northampton by introducing those who know it best. Kidder relies most heavily on native Tommy O'Connor, a 33-year-old police sergeant who has never left his beloved hometown. Tommy's optimism and gentle humor make him an appealing guide, as he shows both the darkest and most charming streets of his town and wrestles with a future that may forever alter his relationship to Northampton. Kidder also introduces readers to Laura Baumeister, a young working mother and Ada Comstock scholar at Smith College who is struggling to care for her son and keep up with the rigorous school curriculum; Alan Scheinman, a real estate lawyer who made a fortune in the 1980s, now plagued by a crippling case of obsessive-compulsive disorder; and Samson Rodriguez, a former loom operator who may have been one of the first people to bring crack cocaine to Northampton. --Kera Bolonik

From Publishers Weekly

The small Massachusetts city of Northampton, tucked away in the Berkshires, makes a compelling case study of civilization's highest aspirations and its inevitable chaotic failures. Combining postcard prettiness and urban peril, Northampton, writes Kidder (Old Friends, etc.), "still preserves the old pattern of the New England township, a place with a full set of parts." That set includes apparent order (its population has changed little in 40 years), leafy neighborhoods, a thriving downtown and the elite Smith College. But through that stability run cracks: ragged housing projects, crumbling infrastructure and crime. Kidder finds Northampton capable of harboring "appalling abundance" in the private lives of its 30,000 citizens, and he taps the town's diversity selectively, profiling a single mother from California who studies at Smith, a crack-addled drug informant, a judge, a lawyer whose obsessive compulsive disorder occasions bizarre behavior and, at greatest length, a 33-year-old police sergeant who touches all their lives to varying degrees. As Kidder contrasts diverse newcomers' delight with the more seasoned, conflicted emotions of natives, his book turns into an examination of what holds those who stay, what draws those who come and what haunts those who leave. Kidder's vision combines the realistic detail of a documentary with the broad sweep and imagination of a 19th-century novel of the streets. His assessment of Northampton's unruly equilibrium is an apt description of this book: "somehow it works," and very well. BOMC selection; first serial to the Atlantic Monthly.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 349 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (April 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679455884
• ISBN-13: 978-0679455882
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,337,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. The author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars another kidder gem, February 29, 2000

By 

Gary Delsohn (Corona del Mar CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Home Town (Hardcover)

Tracy Kidder is the best non-fiction writer in America since John McPhee went off the deep end and became fixated on rocks. Kidder takes seemingly small subjects, in this case a nice little town in Massachusetts that works pretty well for most of the people who live there, and manages to tell us a great deal about a great many things: cops, friends, yearning for family, homelessness, a single woman's dreams and even obsessive-compulsive disorder. The writing seems effortless but only because the book is so well crafted. This is one of those books where you feel you have more life inside you simply for having read it. He manages to bring real people to life in a way that makes us truly care about what happens to them. A less talented writer might tell his or her publisher I want to spend a year watching what happens in a small town and the publisher might say forget about it. In Kidder's hands it works beautifully, as we've come to expect. I loved this book.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating look at small town life, July 25, 2000

By 

R. Witte (Croton-on-Hudson, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Home Town (Paperback)

HOME TOWN by Tracy Kidder is a highly entertaining and compelling book where truth is indeed, stranger than fiction, and certainly more entertaining. Kidder writes about the sleepy town of Northampton, Massachusetts, a town that at first glance seems like any other typical small town. Its inhabitants are anything but. There's the local judge who sentences his neighbors, the millionaire with a devastating disorder, a single mother struggling to begin a new life who enrolls at Smith College, a likeable crack addict who works as a police informant, a cop who is accused of a terrible crime and vilified by the town, and holding it all together is life-long resident and detective, Tommy O'Connor, Northampton's paen to small town family life, and its moral glue. HOME TOWN examines what it's like to grow up and live your whole life in the same town and the trepditation that goes with leaving it, about wanting more than what life has to offer, and about loyalty and virtue. Although this is a work of nonfiction, it reads like a novel and is an extremely engaging story and an excellent book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Hamps" Beat "Nohoes" in TKO, January 25, 2000

By 

Allen Smalling "Constant Reader," (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Home Town (Hardcover)

Tracy Kidder had a great gimmick going in "Hometown." He saw Northampton, Massachusetts, as a town divided between two factions: the "Hamps" are the original townies, the old homeowners, the radio listeners, the political establishment, the stay-at-homes. "Noho" describes those who came from afar: the younger, more gentry, more yuppie, more liberal, more affluent, more rootless, more in sympathy with Smith College contingent. Kidder establishes this dichotomy, runs with it for a while . . . and then drops it. He spends too much time cruising around time with one policeman, and the book suffers as a result. Sorry, but I didn't see the patient craftsmanship here that I saw in THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE. What could have been an outstanding book is merely a good one.