Excerpt:
One of my favorite passages of the first chapter of “Mapping Norwood” is one in which Charles, his brother and mother ride the bus from their home to downtown Norwood. On this ride “down Walpole Street … I wave at my home away from home, the town’s public library.” Later on in the book Charles Fanning spends pages on his childhood spent reading, on one of his favorite books and on a place near and dear to both of our hearts, the Morrill Memorial Library.
The tour in Dr. Fanning’s book does not stop at just the library, however. Chapters are devoted to his family’s history, both Yankee and Irish-American, in Norwood and in a young America. It is a memoir rich with memories of small-town America, the sociology of ethnic groups ‘bumping’ against each other and the history of a family.
