Word: belmonts
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...Charter schools only arise where people are not satisfied with the school system—no one is calling for charter schools in Newton, Lexington, Belmont, or Brookline,” Nolan says, referring to some nearby, affluent towns with high-performing schools. “Charter schools give people who are not rich an alternative to their regular schools, and the threat of competition spurs the public schools to improve...
...photograph from the sleepy suburb of Belmont, Mass., circa 1963 shows two people who would later be famous, although nobody had any idea at the time. One is a tiny baby sitting in his mother's lap. The other is a smiling, tough-looking, pompadoured fellow standing behind her. The baby would grow up to be Sebastian Junger, the mega-selling author of The Perfect Storm, the true story of a fishing boat lost at sea. The smiling guy was a handyman named Albert DeSalvo. History would come to know him as the Boston Strangler...
That is the story Junger tells in his new book, A Death in Belmont (W.W. Norton; 320 pages), and that is the question he tries to answer. "My journalism initially took me overseas a lot, and it took me a while to see the amazing story that I had right back at home," he says in a phone call en route to his home in New York City. Junger is by trade a prowler of battlefields and wildernesses, and his placid, well-heeled hometown was not the most obvious starting point. "I liked the idea partly because...
Goldberg's death was--and still is--the only homicide ever to take place in Belmont. When the police wrote it up, they had to use forms marked TRAFFIC BUREAU REPORT. The cops picked up Smith the next day, and although he maintained his innocence and although the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Smith was 35 at the time, a drifter and a drinker with a penchant but not much aptitude for petty crime. Nothing in his history, however, suggests that he was capable of doing what was done...
...DeSalvo's dark world, Junger's clear, beautifully reasonable writing is the literary equivalent of night-vision goggles. In The Perfect Storm Junger had a great story to work with; in A Death in Belmont there is no central thread. He's navigating a maze of shadows, and you can see all the more clearly what an enormously skillful prose artist he is. Absent a pulse-pounding narrative, Junger entrances the reader by picking out small details--like the score of the kickball game being played in front of Goldberg's house when she died--that give the events...