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DISAPPEARING INTO NORTH ADAMS“I can sit there and see where North Adams used to be,” says Peter Cronin, from the deck of his hillside home. Author Joe Manning understands. He has been writing about North Adams for nearly eight years, and he achieved wide acclaim for Steeples, his first book about this small city in the Berkshires. Starting in 1968, North Adams residents witnessed a devastating urban renewal program that wiped out most of its commercial and residential buildings downtown, many of them historic landmarks; but the program was unable to deliver on the promise of new retail development. Eighteen years later, the Sprague Electric Company, which had employed 4,200 workers in 1968, abandoned its sprawling 28-building factory located just two blocks from Main Street. Many natives moved south, and once-thriving neighborhoods began a slow and painful disintegration. It wasn’t until the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) obtained funding to locate in the abandoned Sprague mill that people began to feel a sense of hope. When it opened in 1999 to rave reviews and huge audiences, MASS MoCA became the largest center for contemporary art and the performing arts in the United States; and North Adams is now the talk of the art world. Through the lively, heartwarming, and often funny interviews with residents, old and young, the nostalgic archival photographs, the author’s insightful essays and poetry, and his own impressionistic snapshots, the sad but ultimately uplifting story of the rebirth of North Adams comes to life. But this book is also about the author’s spiritual journey in this haunting and strangely beautiful city. Since visiting North Adams for the first time in 1996, Joe Manning has found a renewed sense of purpose in his middle years and a second career as an important writer, photographer, and community activist. “God has blessed me,” he says, “with the people of this city; people who possess a disarming spirit of trust, graciousness, decency, and optimism.” Like the author, readers of this marvelous new book will find themselves Disappearing Into North Adams. Disappearing Into North Adams has 380 pages; a full-color cover; over 190 photographs (24 in full color); nearly 70 interviews; over 60 essays, stories, and poems by the author; and many surprises. “Joe
Manning is a generous writer and listener. He invites us to walk the
streets of one small city in America with him and compels us to listen
to the stories this town has to tell. In the end, we learn as much about
the author and about ourselves as we do about life in a specific time
and place.” “Joe
Manning has written another tender and loving portrait of the city and
its residents who in the midst of change have continued to enjoy a sense
of community. We hear from old-timers and younger residents and come
away with a sense that when folks work together, community not only
survives, it thrives. Joe has taken a long look at this community and
gives us what is finally a story of the expectation that when people act
for the common good, community in the best sense of the word will
prevail.”
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