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Overview
Put together in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, an anthology of both original and beloved essays from Boston area writers past and present, celebrating the city they love.
What defines Boston? Its history? Its landmarks? Its sports teams and shrines? Perhaps the question should be: Who defines Boston? From Henry David Thoreau to Dennis Lehane, Boston has been beloved by many of America’s greatest writers, and there is no better group of people to capture the heart and soul of the Hub. In Our Boston, editor Andrew Blauner has collected both original and reprinted essays from Boston area writers past and present, all celebrating the city so close to their hearts. Boston is more than a geographic location; it is a state of mind. Whether you're getting cannoli in the North End, watching a game at Fenway Park, or journeying across the Charles River to one of the many thriving metro-area cities and towns, there is a connection between people, a sense of "Boston-ness."
From Mike Barnicle to Pico Iyer, Susan Orlean to George Plimpton, Leigh Montville to Lesley Visser, Pagan Kennedy to James Atlas, here is a collection of the best essays by our best writers on one of America’s greatest cities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544263802 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2013 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Running Toward the Bombs
Kevin Cullen
Dawn broke clear and clean over Boston on Patriots’ Day, 2013, and Dan Linskey was up before the dawn.
He walked down Boylston Street, near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, as he does every Patriots’ Day, because this is his town and this is his baby. Dan Linskey is the chief of the Boston Police Department. And he owns every big outdoor event in the city, from the raucous celebrations that follow the championships of Boston’s sports teams, which seem to happen every other year, to the star-spangled festival when the Boston Pops serenades the city every Fourth of July.
His was not an idle walk. As chief of the department, Linskey had drawn up several disaster scenarios, and the reality is that in the post-9/11 world, the marathon, like every other outdoor event in Boston, was a target for terrorists.
Still, there was nothing on this sunny morning that led Linskey to believe it would be anything other than the day it usually is, the people lined along Boylston, five deep, cheering the runners on those last few hundred yards, toward the finish line at the Boston Public Library.
Patriots’ Day is a holiday in Boston recalling the shots fired at Concord and Lexington, just outside the city, when a bunch of farmers took on an empire and won. The traffic is light. Out of the corner of his eye, Dan Linskey spied a woman who had set up camp on the corner of the Ring Road, blocking it. The Ring Road was an access point for emergency vehicles to Boylston Street.
“Ma’am, you can’t stay here,” Dan Linskey told the woman.
This being Boston, she gave it right back to him, informing him that she had got up early to stake out a prime spot on Boylston and she wasn’t giving it up, no matter what he said.
Dan Linskey, a cop for twenty-seven years, a Marine before that, can be nice when he has to be. But he can also be firm. With this woman he was firm, and soon she had begrudgingly decamped to a place farther down Boylston. She was angry, furious actually. But in moving, at Dan Linskey’s insistence, that woman unwittingly saved many lives.
Bill and Denise Richard told the kids the night before that they were heading into town from their Dorchester home to see the marathon. Their children—Henry, nine, Martin, eight, and Jane, seven — were excited. It was a family tradition, and like all family traditions, it was something cherished.
Bill and Denise were what some suburbanites would call homesteaders. From the 1970s right through the end of the twentieth century, many people had left Boston in what the demographers dubbed “white flight.” The Richards were the other side of the coin. They chose to live in the Ashmont section of Dorchester, which like a lot of neighborhoods in Boston’s inner city had seen something of a decline in the second half of the twentieth century.
But the Richards were part and parcel of Ashmont’s revitalization. They sent their kids to the local charter school. They, like others, saw things changing for the better when Chris Douglass, one of the city’s premier restaurateurs, opened a high-end place, the Ashmont Grill, right in the middle of the neighborhood in 2005. And the Richards were prime movers in getting the state to invest heavily in rebuilding the Ashmont train and bus station. The Richards were among those who breathed new life into an old neighborhood, giving it new life and endless possibilities.
The Richard kids were giddy with excitement, leaning against the metal barriers, watching the runners, who were different colors, like the flags of all the world’s nations lining the last portion of the marathon route.
Standing there, enraptured by the sights and sounds of people finishing the last steps of twenty-six miles, the cheering sustained, neither the Richards nor anyone else noticed as a nineteen-year-old Chechen kid named Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wearing his baseball cap backward like many other kids in the crowd, approached from behind. Tsarnaev placed a backpack right behind eight-year-old Martin Richard, then continued to walk up Boylston Street.
They call the fire station Broadway, even though it’s in the South End, a mile away from the real Broadway in South Boston. It houses Engine 7 and Tower Ladder 17, and it is one of the busiest firehouses in the city.
On Patriots’ Day, as the runners passed the finish line on Boylston, the men from Engine 7 were around the corner, at an apartment building on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston’s grandest boulevard. A group of college students had managed to put a gas grill on a narrow balcony to cook hamburgers and hot dogs while they partied Patriots’ Day away.
Two firefighters, Benny Upton and Sean O’Brien, looked at each other, thinking that however smart these kids were to get into college, they couldn’t be that smart.
“Do you guys know how dangerous this is?” Upton asked them.
The college kids were offering sheepish apologies when there was a boom from around the corner.
Upton, a former Marine who had done three combat tours, he knew exactly what had happened.
“Bomb!” he yelled, and he and the men from Engine 7 and Tower Ladder 17 were soon running at full clip up Exeter Street, right into the belly of the beast. They had only just begun running when they heard a second explosion.
“Jesus Christ,” Tommy Hughes said to himself as he ran. Like Upton, he was a former Marine and could only imagine what lay around the corner on Boylston.
Actually, he later told me, he couldn’t imagine it. It was worse than anything he saw in the military. Acrid smoke hung in the air and people lay scattered across the sidewalk. There were pools of blood, body parts. It was, at first, eerily quiet and the firefighters instinctively ran to the sides of the wounded.
Upton, like the other firefighters, knew it was terrorism, and they assumed they were running into secondary explosions, and perhaps a biochemical attack. But they, like their brother and sister police officers and paramedics and EMTs, ran toward the bombs anyway, because that’s what they do.
Tommy Hughes was almost immediately faced with a Hobson’s choice. Two children, one a boy, the other a girl, both missing a leg, lay on the sidewalk, like fish out of water, wriggling helplessly. Hughes reached down and picked up the boy, who was closer to him, but his guilt was assuaged immediately because another firefighter picked up the girl.
The little boy was as much in fear as he was in pain. Tommy Hughes hugged him as much as he carried him.
“It’s OK, buddy,” Tommy Hughes whispered into his ear. “I’ve got you. It’s OK, pal.”
Sean O’Brien, a firefighter from Engine 7, was almost as stunned as the victims, because when he rounded the corner he came face to face with Bill Richard, a friend from the neighborhood in Dorchester.
“I can’t find Denise!” Bill Richard yelled to Sean O’Brien. Bill Richard was clearly in shock, his ears numbed by the explosion.
It was a short-lived blessing, because he did not fully comprehend, in that moment, that his family lay scattered around him: his son was dead, his daughter was missing a leg, his wife had shrapnel in her eye.
O’Brien pushed his emotion aside and his training kicked in. But his task was Herculean. He looked down and saw young Martin.
“I knew Marty was gone,” O’Brien told me a day later.
Sean O’Brien was not just looking at a little boy. He was looking at a little boy who was kind to everyone, including O’Brien’s daughter, who was in the same third-grade class. O’Brien’s heart ached so badly that he almost keeled over. But whatever feelings he had for little Martin Richard, Sean O’Brien forced himself to try to save others. The best way to honor Martin, he later told me, was to save others.
In fact, almost every firefighter from Engine 7 and Tower Ladder 17 knew the Richard family. Many of them were Dorchester guys. The daughter of Kevin Meehan, the chauffeur—firefighter lingo for the engine driver—babysat the Richard kids. The daughter of Eddie Kelly, who was off duty but raced to the scene after watching his wife cross the finish line, was in the same Irish step dance school as Janey Richard.
Table of Contents
Running Toward the Bombs 1Kevin Cullen
Walking on American Avenue 30
Mike Barnicl
Pride or Prejudice 40
André Aciman
The Former Legends 46
E. M. Swift
A Boy’s Boston 58
Charles McGrath
Things in Threes 66
Madeleine Blais
Getting Over Boston 78
George Howe Colt
Accents, or The Missing R 88
Susan Orlean
Bonfire of the Memories 91
David M. Shribman
A City Not on a Hill 102
Joan Wickersham
Our Chowder 108
David Michaelis
Boston, 1972 123
Katherine A. Powers
Transplants 132
Jabari Asim
Diamonds (and Dugouts) Are a
Girl’s Best Friend 147
Lesley Visser
Next Stop: Back Bay 157
Hugh Delehanty
Medora Goes to the Game 169
George Plimpton
The Everything Bagel 185
Leslie Epstein
Wounded, Boston’s Heart Remains Strong 188
Bud Collins
So You Want to Be in Pictures 194
Nell Scovell
America’s Brain 205
Israel Horovitz
Front Row on the Charles 209
Shira Springer
Messing With the Wrong City 218
Dennis Lehane
Boston à la Carte 222
Susan Sheehan
The Athens of America 233
James Atlas
Bothering Bill Russell 239
Leigh Montville
From Somewhere 250
Tova Mirvis
Boston Marriage 259
Pagan Kennedy
Reading Around Boston 268
Scott Stossel
“Souvenir of the Ancient World” 280
Robert Pinsky
Boston Sports: Something for Everyone to Love—
and Complain About 282
Bill Littlefield
The Landscape of Home 290
Carlo Rotella
Thinking Locally, Acting Globally 301
Neil Swidey
Jamaica Pond: My Walden 306
Jessica Shattuck
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu 314
John Updike
The Classroom of the Real 332
Pico Iyer
This Is the Way I Point My View 336
Sally Taylor
Acknowledgments 338
Contributors’ Biographies 344
