Word: northampton
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From a ridge on Mount Holyoke--the mountain, not the college--Tracy Kidder looks down at Northampton, Mass., near where he lives. He has just written an impressionistic portrait of this old New England community, Home Town (Random House; 349 pages; $25.95). From his perch, he dreams up a lofty introduction that concludes, "...the cornfields are a dream of perfect order, and the town seems entirely coherent, self-contained, a place where a person might live a whole life and consider it complete, a tiny civilization all its own." Then, beguiled by a sentimental image, he adds, "The town below...
...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...
...bring immediate recognition and response even among strangers. Seinfeld has given us nine years of original, intelligent comedy and four unforgettable characters without a trace of American-sitcom sugarcoating. Seinfeld has made us closer as a nation by giving us something we can all laugh about. LISA M. PALUMBO Northampton, Mass...
...first slave holder in America was a free African-American who owned other African-Americans. His name was Anthony Johnson, and the first court case in North America establishing the right to own slaves was brought by him in Northampton County, Virginia, in 1653 with respect to a runaway slave named John Casor. The court's decision established the right to enforce lifetime servitude for the first time in the English American colonies over a person who had committed no crime...