Authentically Yankee

INSIDE NEW ENGLANDby Judson Hale '55 Harper & Row, 1982. 257 &xiipp. $12.95

Judson Hale is so deep-dyed a New Englander that he could go to Dartmouth not Harvard without damaging his credentials and status. He has been the editor of Yankee magazine since 1970, and is also the editor of The Old Farmer's Almanac, produced under the same roof, -in Dublin, N.H. He was born in Boston, and grew up in a small town in Maine. With this combination of birth, breeding, habitat, and vocation, he is highly qualified to write a book entitled Inside New England. It is a pleasure to report that the book lives up to the title, and that a visitor from Mars would get a good picture of the region from reading it.

To be sure, the picture is primarily a sunny one, light-hearted and full of amusing New England anecdotes. Mr. Hale does not dwell on the dark satanic milltowns. A chapter titled "The Dark Side" is mostly ghost stories and tales of violent death, not the statistics of rural poverty and high suicide rates. But this reviewer is not going to criticize Mr. Hale for not writing a different book.

What he has written is well described in the publisher's blurb: "an image that will amuse outsiders, and cause true New Englanders to chuckle and nod their heads in knowing agreement." As one of the latter (my grandmother wrote me when I went from Connecticut to Dartmouth, "I'm glad you're going back to your New England roots," which incidentally showed her opinion of Connecticut), I can say that I both chuckled and nodded my head in knowing agreement.

Mr. Hale's chapters deal topically with the important subjects, in New England as elsewhere: small-town living, the food, the humor, the weather and the seasons, the legends, the language, and one called "Love, Sex, and Stuff." He includes a test the reader can take if, by the words he's familiar with, he is any part of a Yankee; and if so, what part of the region he (or she, of course) is from.

At present I am living in Maine, and I enjoyed this book.

Charles Bolté has recently edited a book of hislate wife Mary's writings, Portrait of a Woman Down East.