Word: townes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years that I've spent chronicling Wall Street, and the foibles and traits of characters like McColl, I've learned a lot about how fortunes are made. For McColl, a no-nonsense work ethic and drop-dead loyalty to trusted managers have transformed him from small-town banker to first-class sensation. Sandy Weill, co-CEO of Citigroup, earned riches by seizing out-of-favor companies when, he says, they "look like a disaster to someone else but like an opportunity...
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...
...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 in town--his father Bill was the county treasurer--played Little League...
...author of this extraordinary job of reporting and writing sees the town's humanity through this very human cop, but well before a reader might say, "Yes, yes, got it," he veers off to tell other stories. What he finds amazes him. You'd be overcome, he muses, if all the town's roofs came off and you were forced to look down--"and not just by malignancy and suffering, but by all the tenderness and joy, all the little acts of courage and kindness...to apprehend it all at once--who could stand...