As the title indicates, this memoir is an act of map making, of plotting
out overlapping territories-topographical, temporal, and psychological.
Centered on family life in a Massachusetts town from the 1920s to the
1960s, the author's investigation extends outward to include the Boston
area from colonial times to the recent past, encounters with Boston's
Museum of Fine Arts and with Harvard College, the American Civil War,
and Ireland and Germany in the nineteenth century.Charles Fanning
re-creates the landscape of childhood and adolescence in a place and
time both ordinary and rich with possibility. An expert on Irish
immigration, he was born and raised in Norwood, Massachusetts, twelve
miles outside of Boston, where Yankee and Irish cultures bumped against
each other. The narrative traces his personal growth, shaped by family,
school, baseball, radio drama, and art. He was the first in his family
to attend college, and the book ends with his undergraduate experience
at Harvard, class of 1964.Along with this coming-of-age story, Mapping
Norwood features forays back in time, including chapters on each of
Fanning's parents and historical excavations and meditations on three
ancestors. Guided by his own experience as a scholar, the pressure of
these chapters is epistemological-the thrill of the hunt toward knowing.
Fanning's great-grandfather, John Fanning, disappeared from the family
in the late 1880s, and a chapter chronicles the discovery of "Walking
John's"? fifty years of hidden later life in East St. Louis, Illinois,
where he died alone in 1946. Fanning's great-great-grandfather, Winslow
Radcliffe, was a veteran of the 35th Massachusetts Infantry in the Civil
War, and the author traces this regiment through the horrors of Antietam
and Fredericksburg, by means of diaries and letters by four men from
Winslow's company. The evidence gleaned helps explain Winslow's suicide
after the war. An Irish immigrant ancestor, Phillip Fanning, came to
Boston from County Monaghan just after the Great Famine of the late
1840s. Relying on historical research, Fanning imagines vividly the
lives led by Phillip's family and thousands like them in the wake of
Ireland's nineteenth-century catastrophe.
