Word: northampton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...HOME TOWN This fond but completely unsentimental portrait of Northampton, Mass., captures the joys and the sheer human cussedness on daily display there. Tracy Kidder lives nearby, and he spent years listening to his neighbors and walking their streets. His book is an extraordinary feat of reporting and writing, a vivid reminder both of why so many Americans flee the small towns of their birth and why so many of them miss the sense of belonging that such places inspire...
...stood in admiration of the intellectual life surrounding me--Amherst is Emily Dickinson's hometown and also a famous seat of learning in New England, with the presence of Amherst College, Hampshire College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, not to mention Smith College down the road in Northampton and Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley. How could a few citizens of this traditionally liberal enclave have made such a crushingly wrong decision, based on a fundamental misunderstanding, by canceling the free expression of a classic musical which still has a great deal to teach...
Mary Dunn rose quickly into the administrative ranks and served as Dean of Bryn Mawr College for seven years. In 1985, she was tapped as president of all-female Smith College in Northampton, Mass...
...really. That sugary last sentence, conjuring a toy town in a glass paperweight, doesn't describe Northampton or, fortunately, Kidder's fond but unsentimental book. The author's great gift, in fact, is for looking at his subjects straight on. He did this impressively in The Soul of a New Machine (1981), about the development of a supermini-computer, and in House (1985), about the jostling interchanges among architect, builders and buyers of a private home...
Kidder surveys Northampton through several sets of eyes--those of a local judge, a shelf of historians, a gabble of politicians, a small-bore drug dealer and an adult scholarship student at Smith College. But the observer who tells most of the story--whose life, to a considerable extent, is the story--is a not quite middle-aged town cop named Tommy O'Connor. If what he had to tell were simply the reports of night patrols, arrests made, cars chased, shots taken or withheld, the view would be a narrow kind of truth. But O'Connor was born...