Back Home: Journeys through Mobile

By Ralph O. Muncaster

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."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0817310452
• ISBN13: 9780817310455
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A Very Detailed Book

I've read alot of books about space, but this is the most detailed space book I've ever read. The part about time machines and black holes was confusing but very interesting. I had no idea it was possible to make a time machine, or is it? This book may not be right on everything but I trust it. I trust all the books I read (not including fiction books). The part about the box and the light going through was really interesting...

This book is extrodinary (and makes you think a lot.)

Eyewitness Time & Space tells about many time theorys as well as space theorys (actually, they are one, also known as "spacetime" as it metions in the book.) This book tells about the history of time and space and how people have dealed with it over the milleniums and centuries, bio-space and bio-time, and spacetime laws. It even talks about going "across the universes". This means there are parallel dimensions happening...

CONFUSING, yet interresting

I had to make a report on black holes and time traveling. I read this book knowing nothing about scientific theories, trying to search for knowledge on the topic. It helped me a lot. It showed me how a time machine can be build. HOWEVER, it didn't based this theory on much. I was left dazed and confused. When I asked teachers to help me understand, they said it was just IMPOSSIBLE! Should this book be categorized as fiction?...