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Disappearing Into North Adams

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"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 five 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 twenty-eight 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 of contemporary art and performance 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. The author donates $2.00 of each sale to the North Adams Public Library.

Quotes From Reviews

"Disappearing Into North Adams is a wonderful, personality-filled account of a period of change in a small New England mill town. Joe Manning has a poet’s eyes and ears for the small things that matter: the inflections of speech, the loss of architectural artifacts, the threatening power of fresh ideas. He knows that commercial advertisements disappearing into the walls of brick buildings are rare and beautiful. The book is full of personal recollections that Manning wins through careful, caring interviews. Interwoven with the interviews, placed like fossils, are poems, photographs and short essays, most by Manning, who is a fine writer. The book has a gritty feel of the reality it absorbs. It is both a richly layered historical record and a piercing look forward." -Joseph Thompson, Director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

"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." -Elizabeth Winthrop, author of fifty works of fiction for adults and children, including Island Justice, In My Mother's House, The Castle In The Attic, and Shoes.

"Disappearing Into North Adams is a brilliantly executed and engaging account of a scrappy Massachusetts mill town attempting to remake itself. (It is) replete with real expressions and reflections from residents, an indication of how hard Manning listened to understand life’s rhythms in North Adams. Manning’s description of the coming to town of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is an important account of the ways that life-long community residents, developers, and newcomers can work productively for the re-use of abandoned industrial space. (His) deft touches as an interviewer capture the personal hardships and life-altering confusions associated with job loss and economic dislocation. For anyone interested in learning more about the daily lives and thoughts of the people who built the country and then saw their handiwork threatened with extinction, Disappearing Into North Adams with Manning is a meaningful trip to take." -Robert Forrant, Associate Professor, Department of Regional Economic and Social Development, University of Massachusetts Lowell, as published in The Public Historian, Spring 2004.

"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." -Steve Green, Professor of Sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

"Disappearing Into North Adams is magnificent. Joe Manning has created a work that will outlive us all. A hundred years from now, people will still be reading, studying and enjoying this book, and admiring the passion and insight of the man who wrote it." -Mark Rondeau, Editor of The Advocate

"Disappearing Into North Adams offers a vision of how the ups and long downs of places can be experienced by a wide range of people. C. Wright Mills, America's famous sociologist in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote a book called The Sociological Imagination. He defined the sociological imagination as the intersection of history and biography, and he suggested that in order to understand social structural, we need to constantly look at both history and biography. That is exactly what Manning does. He looks at history through the biographies of individuals as they lived through the changes that occurred and continue to occur in North Adams. Every place needs a Joe Manning to donate time and energy to reconstruct the history of the past in order to understand the present. -Joseph Sullivan, sociologist and lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Read excerpts from "Disappearing Into North Adams"

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joe@sevensteeples.com