Books: The Soul of a Small Town

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 fits in the palm...