Ptown - Hardcover

Nicholas von Hoffman columnist, "New York Observer" and opera librettist, "Nicholas and Alexandra" What a terrific book! It's rare to get your social history and analysis so nicely concealed in hypnotically fascinating reading. "Ptown's" got everything: drama, love, crime, humor, real estate, nostalgia, art, celebrities, you name it.

"WHEN YOU LOOK BACK AT ITS HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE A PROGRESSION IN PROVINCETOWN, THINGS GETTING WILDER AND WILDER, THE OUTLAW ELEMENT BECOMING THE NORM." Provincetown, Massachusetts, has long been one of the country's most celebrated enclaves for the rich, creative, and infamous. Acclaimed writer and longtime Provincetown resident Peter Manso brings fifty years of life and observation to this engaging, at times scandalous, portrait of the unique seaside town located at the furthermost tip of Cape Cod. Filled with lively and intriguing anecdotes about some of its most notorious residents -- from Norman Mailer and Robert Motherwell to Tennessee Williams, John Waters, and Congressman Gerry Studds -- "Ptown" gives readers a rare and revealing glimpse into the lives of this eccentric community. Home for decades to pirates, communists, fishermen, drug smugglers, and artists, Provincetown has been a maverick society since its beginning, with residents who have always valued liberty over law. Its live-and-let-live mentality has enabled local fishermen to live side by side with America's most famous painters, novelists, and playwrights, making Provincetown an object of fascination throughout the country and a thriving tourist spot that brings more than one million visitors to the area each year. Provincetown today also has one of the largest homosexual populations per capita of any single city in the United States, a demographic shift that has altered the town's businesses, buildings, and schools -- only one birth took place in 2000, out of a year-round population of about 3,500. Drawing on Provincetown's rich and diverse cultural history, Manso brings his razor-sharpperception to this compulsively readable account of a people and a town as it evolved from a rustic fishing village to one of America's most exclusive resorts with the highest real estate values on the Cape. From the everyday lives of the store owners, restaurateurs, Realtors, and local police to the scandal that erupted over the recent murder of heiress Christa Worthington, "Ptown" offers an unparalleled glimpse into a rarefied world where old traditions and new money can create unusual -- and at times uneasy -- bedfellows. Lively, penetrating, and occasionally shocking, "Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape" captures Provincetown as never before.