Home Town

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains invites us into a lively Massachusetts town and explores the lives of the ordinary and extraordinary people who live there."This is a book rich with a sense of place, woven like a tapestry, animated by the lives within it, both past and present."-Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil ActionIn this splendid book, one of America's masters of nonfiction takes us home-into Hometown, U.
S. A., the town of Northampton, Massachusetts. 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.