Charles Champlin's sentimental journey back through his boyhood in Hammondsport, New York. The author recreates the aura of life in a small town, examining small-town roots. He shares his childhood and provides a sense of all that we hold dear in our past.

Charles Champlin is best known as a columnist and film critic for the Los Angeles Times. His career as a journalist, however, has spanned decades, first as a writer for Life and later as a London-based correspondent for Time magazine. This book continues where his last memoir left off, with the author moving at the age of sixteen with his mother from Hammondsport, New York, to a village on Oneida Lake. Turning his journalistic eye on his own life, Champlin offers a series of vivid sketches that brings to life the events and people he encounters. His interviews with Peter O'Toole and other...