Back home: journeys through Mobile (First Edition edition.)

After twenty years in New York City, a prize-winning writer takesa "long look back" at his hometown of Mobile, Alabama.In Back Home: Journeys through Mobile, Roy Hoffmantells stories--through essays, feature articles, and memoir--of one ofthe South's oldest and most colorful port cities.

Many of the pieces heregrew out of Hoffman's work as Writer-in-Residence for his hometown newspaper,the Mobile Register, a position he took after working in New YorkCity for twenty years as a journalist, fiction writer, book critic, teacher,and speech writer.

Other pieces were first published in the New YorkTimes, Southern Living, Preservation, and other publications.Together, this collection comprises a long, second look at the Mobile ofHoffman's childhood and the city it has since become.Like a photo album, Back Home presents close-upportraits of everyday places and ordinary people.

There are meditationson downtown Mobile, where Hoffman's grandparents arrived as immigrantsa century ago; the waterfront where longshoremen labor and shrimpers worktheir 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 walksacross the stage of Back Home.Throughout, Hoffman is concerned with stories and theirenduring nature.

As he writes, "When buildings are leveled, when land isdeveloped, when money is spent, when our loved ones pass on, when we takeour places a little farther back every year on the historical time-line,what we have still are stories."