From Publishers Weekly
Much of what we read about growing up in American small towns tells us that life there is stultifying and well worth escaping. Yet Champlin ( The Movies Grow Up, 1940 - 1980 ) begs to differ: "Violating all the traditions of small-town writers-to-be, I was never frenzied with impatience to be away or to experience life as it truly was in the city." Yet he left Hammondsport, N.Y., in 1942 at 16 and has since worked as a reporter, film critic and editor in New York, London and Los Angeles--and in this memoir he revisits the village where he was born. Critical intelligence, not nostalgia, drives these essays, and even expected local color--Saturday nights, the neighborhood church, the gas station hangout--is handled freshly. Without illusions the author writes of being poor, of his parents' divorce and of the Depression: "The image of the gray men sitting on the back porch stays with me forever." Though his prose lacks toughness and bite, and at times slips into repetitiousness, Champlin is generous and realistic in his portrait of "the closeness of the community with its everlasting scrutiny." Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In the 1930s, Hammondsport, New York, was a small town of only 1200, complete with as much local color as similar communities across the United States. Well-known film critic Champlin recounts his first 16 years in Hammondsport in a delightful narrative of growing up during the Depression. The flood of the summer of 1935 provides one setting for the author's reflections on his home town: the seriousness of the flood is countered by the barrels of Prohibition brandy which the flood waters deposited around the streets of Hammondsport. Pioneer aviator Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a Hammondsport native; his early success at building airplanes earned the town its nickname, "the cradle of aviation." Full of humor and revealing confessions, Champlin's entertaining book proves you can go home again. One of the best reminiscences to appear recently.
- Boyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., Ala.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Boyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., Ala.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
