A decade-long resident of the once-legendary textile mill city of Lawrence, Mass., Schinto offers a modest, intriguing blend of reportage, history and reflection on her former home. The real trouble with blighted Lawrence, she states at the outset, is the loss of not the middle class but the working class. Yet, having moved there with her husband, returning to his family's business, she grew to enjoy the bonds of neighborhood and recognized, unlike some old-timers, that the downtown was not so much dead as transformed by the city's new, Latino population. Delving into the city's past, Schinto reports on Lawrence's haphazard housing history, its strikes and its churches. Her portrait of the contemporary city includes interviews with recent immigrants and an account of her husband's unsuccessful campaign for city council against a machine pol. Overcrowding, she observes, cramps people both physically and psychically: hence her title. But in a town where welfare offices occupy old mill space, it will take not only local self-reliance, the author argues, but also state and national strategies to revive a long-suffering economy.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Journalist/novelist Schinto (Shadow Bands, LJ 12/88) focuses here on Lawrence, Massachusetts, a city that rose out of the Industrial Revolution to become home to European immigrants searching for a better life by working in the textile mills. Immigrants are still coming to Lawrence although they are no longer of European descent; the textile mills have long disappeared. The author lived in Lawrence for ten years and became fascinated by its people and history, which she likens to that of other industrial cities in America. Written in a conversational, friendly style as if the author were talking with her readers rather than giving them a history lecture, her book is full of vignettes about Lawrencians and peppered with her own perceptions. The result is exceptionally personal reading. Unfortunately, the work lacks a bibliography and endnotes, making it difficult for the reader to separate the author's personal opinions from documented sources. For students and those with an interest in immigrants and the Industrial Revolution.?Dorothy Lilly, Grosse Pointe North H.S. Lib., Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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