David Mamet 19s various musings collected under the title 1CSouth of the Northeast Kingdom 1D is mostly about Vermont except when it is about everywhere else, perhaps meant to contrast the rest of the world with Vermont. The title is unexplained except to note that the northeastern part of Vermont is called the Northeast Kingdom, and that is just what it is called. Mamet (the final 1Ct 1D is pronounced), a native of Chicago, went to Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, in the 1960s, and has lived in Vermont on and off ever since, in spite of a career in theater, film and television that has taken him to New York and Los Angeles. One of Mamet 19s most obviously relevant references to the outside world seems to imply that the flight from Boston to Los Angeles that was one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was a flight that he often took himself. So when he speaks of the impact of that event on the national consciousness, there is a particularly personal twinge for Mamet himself. It is not his closest brush with death. Once, he got lost in the Vermont woods in the dead of winter. As the sun fell, he finally found himself less than a mile from his own house. If he had gone this way instead of that, he might have frozen to death.

Mamet feels like an outsider after many decades in Vermont, even though three of his four children have been born in the town nearest his northern Vermont home. Unlike most Vermonters, he is Jewish and conscious of how it adds to his status as an outsider, and yet he finds that native Vermonters have always treated him with respect and even kindness. He does, however, enjoy the friendships of fellow Jews who have moved to Vermont. Many of his essays include sketches of the people he has met and whom he calls friends in Vermont, and he has joined both locals and fellow transplants in their activities. He knows people who came to Vermont to write, practice traditional arts and crafts or start restaurants, but he is also intimately familiar with the places where the natives eat and catch up on the town gossip. He has befriended the old country doctor, retired policemen, several World War II veterans, country store owners and a pair of twins who repair cars.

One of the reasons that I got this book was that I am planning to read Mamet 19s newest book 1CThe Secret Knowledge 1D about his odyssey from liberalism to conservatism. 1CNortheast Kingdom 1D turns out to be a good place to start because it shows Mamet at a very early stage of his transformation. While being, at the time these essays were published in 2002, a liberal democrat who is suspicious of modern corporations and disdainful of republicans, Mamet is already more comfortable with his VFW friends at a Fourth of July parade than with the Bread and Puppet Theatre of Glover, Vermont, whose skits decry 1Csome specific or vague aspect of human nature that is currently causing them particular sorrow. 1D Mamet finds their indignation 1Csmug 1D (which more or less matches my impression of them when I saw them a couple of years ago).

Significantly, Mamet admires the New England town meetings he has witnessed. This direct democracy is a visceral reality that speaks to Mamet of self-reliance and individual responsibility as much as it does of intimate community. Elsewhere in the 1CEmpire, 1D as Mamet calls America at large, there is neither self-sufficiency nor responsibility nor communitarian intimacy. And the attempts to create a sense of community in America at large tend to be artificial because the genuine intimacy of a village may be gone in most places, only preserved in the little towns that Mamet has found and which most Americans no longer believe exist. But a problem for Mamet in his 2002 persistence in thinking of himself as a liberal democrat is that the Democratic party had by then already been infiltrated-and seems to be guided today-by people who do not believe in or want self-reliance or individual responsibility. The only kind of community they want to foster is the kind that they can control from Washington, DC, not the kind where there might be genuine intimacy between members of the community. They are opposed to everything that Mamet admires about his neighbors.

Another reason I read this book is because I have ancestors who lived in Vermont, and I wanted to shed light on their experience. I am not sure whether I learned very much I did not know. My ancestors lived in the southeastern part of the state very long ago, but they undoubtedly saw the genesis of the culture Mamet describes.

Best in Mamet 19s book are the anecdotes about people and things that he and others have experienced in Vermont; not incidentally, there seems to be a discernable lesson in each of these stories.

Once, when he was a young man living in Vermont 19s state capital, Montpelier, and just making ends meet, Mamet went to the state office building to see if there was a form or instruction booklet that would help him with a problem he was having filling out his state income tax. Poking his head into an open doorway, he asked a woman if there was such a form. She began asking him questions and wound up helping him do his taxes. She was the state income tax commissioner. Lesson: Vermont is such a small, intimate place that even the state officials are neighborly.

A traveling salesman who targeted women who were planning to get married sent an advertisement of his presentation to the Vermont college where Mamet was teaching. The school 19s lesbian community invited the salesman to come; only they presented him with a roomful of half-naked, body-painted young women in blatant public displays of affection. Mamet witnessed this unpromising start but, unable to bear the poor man 19s humiliation, wandered off for a while. Unable to stay away forever, though, he returned in time to see women lining up to buy pots and pans. Lesson: Vermont salesmen are determined-and just possibly unfazed by anything. Perhaps, also, there is the lesson that everybody needs pots and pans, and lesbians are no different. ( )

South of the Northeast Kingdom by David Mamet is the 11th book I have read in the National Geographic Directions series. I really like this series and the idea that people who live in a famous place, or visit it frequently, have some insights into the character of that place, appeals to me. This is an opinion that I happen to share. People who move somewhere oftentimes have insights about the character of a place that the natives don’t have. It is the distinctive viewpoint of the inside outsider that National Geographic has tried to capture with this series.

However, this was not the best of this series. It read more like a disjointed set of sound bites, ideas, or sketches for one of Mamet’s plays or movies than it did an essay about Vermont. However, I have to admire a person who moved to Vermont in the 1970’s, taught in the public schools there, and fought to keep his beloved farmhouse even when going through a divorce. This says something about his devotion to the place and the people. After his divorce he stayed to raise a family and has continued to commute back and forth to his “home” there for 40 years. Clearly he loves the place. To bad he didn’t do a better job of writing about it. ( )

This is a brief, intense, alternately reverent and crotchety, unsentimental paean to Vermont that was, Vermont that still is, just barely. A collection of 15 loose essays -- each one circling around an aspect of Vermont that has meaning for him: his old post and beam house, his woodstove, his daily trip to the local coffee shop, to guns, to clothing...

Mamet moved to Vermont in the mid-60's -- part of what I think of the first wave of flatlanders to 'discover' what seemed like an utterly forgotten rural paradise (even with the rugged winter). He went to Goddard and then he stayed, in love with the place enough to get whatever jobs he could swing. And he has stayed. I admire that. He writes with great delicacy of the uncomfortable feeling all those from 'away' who have come to live here, who weren't born in Vermont, feel around those who have, say, lived or worked or farmed for more than a century (precious few of those left, of course). Dorothy Canfield Fisher strongly and generously makes the point that Vermont thrives on waves of newcomers, that it wouldn't really work without them, and I think she even anticipated that there would be some new permutation, that in 1952 when she wrote her book about Vermont, things were on a downslide in a country that was gearing up for a new era. Mamet is more pessimistic, thinks Vermont is well on the way to becoming merely a suburb of the great metropolitan sprawl from Boston on down.

Some of the meatiest writing is about our love affair with machines -- a great number of people who move to Vermont embrace the older crafts, the old way of doing things, weaving and pottery -- a getting down to basics that Mamet truly feels is an essential part of living a grounded and sane life - he builds his own stone wall, and ruefully admits it is already falling down..... but he loved building it.

A last quote that I'm only adding for its delightfulness: "A carpenter, working at my place that previously he had been tearing down some home in Montpelier. He was in the process of demolishing what he said was a particularly stupidly conceived improvement in a staircase. He took a crowbar to it, and found scribbled on the back of the lath: A fool is paying me to do this job.

I heartily recommend South of the Northeast Kingdom to anyone who loves reading about rural life and likes the essay form. I give it ****1/2 because I had a lot of fun reading it and recognizing things, but be mindful that this is a book I could not read objectively, so that 1/2 is about my own pleasure. ( )

As I mentioned in my review of Bill McKibben's Wandering Home, I picked up my copy of Mamet's South of the Northeast Kingdom during a recent visit to Vermont. As I often do, I tried to find books to give me a greater feel for the area. In both books, I succeeded.

Mamet's book was a great, albeit arduous read. I've never read any of Mr. Mamet's writings so I must admit that I spent a great deal of time with the dictionary in my lap attempting to find the meaning of words such as perfidy and sinecure. While that slowed me down, it was a fun challenge.

I felt that the book was an interesting contrast to Mr. McKibben's in that McKibben spends a good portion of his book describing the physical beauty of the Champlain Valley and Adirondack areas of VT and NY. Mr. Mamet on the other hand delivered more of an essay on the state's culture. This was interspersed throughout with Mamet's personal frustrations with the current state of politics, war, and environmental desecration - which, based on his writing, seems to parallel the typical Vermonter's attitude towards these subjects.

I don't believe a book review is the place for me to expound on whether or not I agree with Mamet's opinions on these matters so I'll avoid that pitfall. Instead, I'll note that the book did a superb job of letting you "feel" the Vermont approach to life. Mamet's words can be truly moving. While taken out of context, these may have less of an impact, nonetheless, here are a couple of examples:

"The Vermonters and the Scots practice economy of words. This is not a reluctance to communicate, but a desire to communicate only those things of which one is sure, and upon which one intends to act.

In the cities, words are used to charm, to seduce, to misdirect. Here we are expected to say what we mean; those who use words otherwise will be held accountable, perhaps considered fools."

or when speaking of the grief that Americans shared after 9/11:

"This was not the America of bombast and self-congratulation, but sorrow for the good that we recognize and participate in as the fellow feeling of those who share a simple blessing.

I've always felt that love and commonality in Vermont."

It's a very enjoyable book and I highly recommend it. ( )