Small Town Tales

by Sidney Hall Jr.

Literary Nonfiction. These vivid sketches of small-town America in another era and of Mr. Hall's eccentric and marvelous family have been collected from his popular newspaper column, A Brookline Boyhood . They are so rooted in place and time that they uncannily evoke the reader's own past. Award-winning southern novelist and poet Fred Chappell calls this a "wonderfully enjoyable book of reminiscences and speculations. SMALL TOWN TALES preserves memories the way happy farmwives preserve peaches and strawberries. The results are equally wholesome and delicious. Sidney Hall's work is a rare treat!"

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[charlie]

An exceedingly charming collection of short reminisces (originally newspaper columns) by poet Sidney Hall - really short anecdotes, each under a thousand words, which in aggregate paint the picture of his eccentric childhood in a quirky small NH town as part of a quirky, inventive, large NH family. Sid grew up in the fifties and early sixties, and one cannot help but feel nostalgic for a simple time when kids had too much time on their hands and we're constantly engaged in wild engineering projects or other risky undertakings, usually involving homemade objects with wheels or falling from heights above ten feet, that, thanks to some miracle of good karma and dumb luck, don't kill them. Seems safer and healthier than sitting around your room on the Internet! This short book is a great complement to Judson Hale's The Education Of A Yankee another NH childhood memoir, the kind of Old Family stories that make the Yankee Magazine region so charming.

In the interest of full disclosure, Sid is a dear friend of mine, and over beers on the dock at The Lake, we and his family have swapped stories and watched many sunsets together in the summer. I have known him and his crazy clan all of my life, but that has not prejudiced this review one iota.