Description:
A searching portrait of a city battered by the collapse of the textile industry woven into a spirited coming of age story
Review Quotes:
"[This memoir] provides a multi-generational study of a family--his family--in refreshingly frank detail. The book can be read on many different levels, all of them worthwhile and instructive."--James M. O'Toole, The New England Quarterly
"An expert historian's wonderfully honest memoir of growing up in Fall River, 'the city of hills, mills, and dinner pails.' It's an authentic American story, beautifully told."--Gordon S. Wood, Professor of History Emeritus, Brown University, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution
"Conforti has written a marvelously engaging memoir of self-discovery and the making of a historian. By exploring and coming to terms with his roots in a New England mill city, he tells a story that is quintessentially American. Always aware of context, from his boyhood in Fall River in the 1950s to his young adulthood in the 1970s, Conforti treats the reader to often brilliant and sometimes humorous insight into the ethnic cultures of New England, its industrial and Yankee past, its post-industrial present, and its sometimes seedy politics."--Ron Formisano, author of The Tea Party: A Brief History and Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s