Back Home: Journeys through Mobile
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Book Overview
After twenty years in New York City, a prize-winning writer takes a "long look back" at his hometown of Mobile, Alabama.
In Back Home: Journeys through Mobile, Roy Hoffman tells stories--through essays, feature articles, and memoir--of one of the South's oldest and most colorful port cities. Many of the pieces here grew out of Hoffman's work as Writer-in-Residence for his hometown newspaper, the Mobile Register, a position he took after working in New York City for twenty years as a journalist, fiction writer, book critic, teacher, and speech writer. Other pieces were first published in the New York Times, Southern Living, Preservation, and other publications. Together, this collection comprises a long, second look at the Mobile of Hoffman's childhood and the city it has since become. Like a photo album, Back Home presents close-up portraits of everyday places and ordinary people. There are meditations on downtown Mobile, where Hoffman's grandparents arrived as immigrants a century ago; the waterfront where longshoremen labor and shrimpers work their nets; the back roads leading to obscure but intriguing destinations. Hoffman records local people telling their own tales of race relations, sports, agriculture, and Mardi Gras celebrations. Fishermen, baseball players, bakers, authors, political figures--a strikingly diverse population walks across the stage of Back Home. Throughout, Hoffman is concerned with stories and their enduring nature. As he writes, "When buildings are leveled, when land is developed, when money is spent, when our loved ones pass on, when we take our places a little farther back every year on the historical time-line, what we have still are stories."Customer Reviews
Rated 4 starsSketches of Mobile
Back Home is a series of vignettes that Roy Hoffman published in the Mobile Press-Register and other outlets during the 1990s. Hoffman grew up in Mobile, and then moved away to attend college at Tulane University and to work for the New York Times. Back Home connects Mobile's past and present. Hoffman is a strong writer and readers will find very few missteps in his prose. The story is very personal to Hoffman, and he often...
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Rated 5 starsa good book for anyone, anywhere, not just in Mobile
This is a brilliant book. Hoffman draws fascinating portraits of a barrage of characters from in and around Mobile, and also ex-Mobilians. I am from Long Island, New York, and this was an incredibly readable, vastly enjoyable, slice of life from a different part of the country. Hoffman is a talented journalist and top-notch writer. He gives turns the local into the universal, while vividly analyzing a small cross section...
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Rated 5 starsMobile Revisted
It is impossible to grow up in Mobile, Alabama without this historic Southern city leaving its indelible mark. Even though I moved away 25 years ago, I still call Mobile home. Roy Hoffman's collection of articles about the people and places that make Mobile unique, brought back many memories and has stayed with me long after I turned the last page. The Mobile Register is indeed fortunate to have such a talented writer at its...
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Rated 5 starsYou Can Go Home Again
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Rated 5 starsYou Can Go Home Again
Roy Hoffman has disproved the theory that you can't go home again. With the turn of each page, I'm transported from central Texas to the city of my birth. His book, BACK HOME : JOURNEYS THROUGH MOBILE, is truly that. My mind journey's to Bienville Square, the Saenger Theater, Toolen High School, The Cathedral, the variety of languages that greeted my ears as I walked with my grandmother down Dauphin Street, the Electric Maid...
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