Product Description

Set on the high ground at the heart of Cape Ann, the village of Dogtown is peopled by widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and "witches." Among the inhabitants of this hamlet are Black Ruth, who dresses as a man and works as a stonemason; Mrs. Stanley, an imperious madam whose grandson, Sammy, comes of age in her brothel; Oliver Younger, who survives a miserable childhood at the hands of his aunt; and Cornelius Finson, a freed slave. At the center of it all is Judy Rhines, a fiercely independent soul, deeply lonely, who nonetheless builds a life for herself against all imaginable odds.

Rendered in stunning, haunting detail, with Diamant's keen ear for language and profound compassion for her characters, The Last Days of Dogtown is an extraordinary retelling of a long-forgotten chapter of early American life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72787 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Fans of Diamant's The Red Tent who were disappointed by her sophomore effort (Good Harbor) will be happy to find her back on historical turf in her latest, set in early 1800s Massachusetts. Inspired by the settlement of Dogtown, Diamant reimagines the community of castoffs—widows, prostitutes, orphans, African-Americans and ne'er-do-wells—all eking out a harsh living in the barren terrain of Cape Ann. Black Ruth, the African woman who dresses like a man and works as a stonemason; Mrs. Stanley, who runs the local brothel, and Judy Rhines, an unmarried white woman whose lover Cornelius is a freed slave, are among Dogtown's inhabitants who are considered suspect—even witches—by outsiders. Shifting perspectives among the various residents (including the settlement's dogs, who provide comfort to the lonely), Diamant brings the period alive with domestic details and movingly evokes the surprising bonds the outcasts form in their dying days. This chronicle of a dwindling community strikes a consistently melancholy tone—readers in search of happy endings won't find any here—but Diamant renders these forgotten lives with imagination and sensitivity.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
In one of his short stories, Richard Ford wrote that we do not remember the past; we only imagine it. For no contemporary novelist is this truer than for Anita Diamant, whose latest book is set in the early 19th century on Cape Ann, a stony nubbin of Massachusetts coastline that, according to an old local joke, was "the last place that God created, since it was where He dumped all the rocks that were of no use elsewhere." Diamant's new novel is not, as its publisher claims, a work of historical fiction. More accurately, what she has created -- as she did in her bestselling first novel, The Red Tent -- is the overlay of a modern sensibility on an imagined past.

Dogtown is the derisive name for a once-promising settlement, which by 1814 has been reduced to "a collection of broken huts and hovels inhabited mostly by spinsters and widows without children, and few with so much as an extra spoon in her cupboards." Legends about the place flourish in every barroom in the neighboring towns: It's said that only witches and whores remain there, and that "they dally with their dogs." Diamant's casually episodic plot aims to reveal the real folk behind the Dogtown legends. She tracks the community's disintegration through interlocking vignettes that are punctuated by a series of funerals, while gradually exposing the secret loves and hatreds that bind these stragglers together.

Among those vignettes is the tale of Tammy Younger, a foul-mouthed skinflint universally loathed because of her taste for blackmail and her appalling mistreatment of her orphaned great-nephew. To counter the whispers of witchery that surround this figure, Diamant underscores her frailties. In one scene, Tammy nearly bleeds to death after an unsympathetic acquaintance performs some barbaric dentistry with a wedge and a mallet. Some years later, she's found face-down in a bowl of decomposing stew.

Another tragicomic scene features the drunkard and pimp John Stanwood, who is compelled to mend his ways after he spies what looks like an angel in a tree. Sober, Stanwood proves to be twice as tedious as when he was drunk, and the town sighs with relief when he abandons his religious calling.

Stanwood's partner in prostitution is Mrs. Stanley, an aging ex-beauty who presides imperiously over two miserable trollops. What makes this ménage worse than "the saddest excuse for a whorehouse" its customers have ever seen is the tenancy of Mrs. Stanley's 11-year-old grandson, who's forced to work as their house servant.

The settlement's former slaves fare even worse. Cornelius Finson's mother survived the middle passage but died of fever when he was 10. When he was 18, his masters sold their farm and set him free, but "he had no idea what to do with himself or where to go." For 20 years, he takes shelter in one half-wrecked Dogtown house after another, finding work where he can. Black Ruth dresses in men's clothing and works as a stonemason, living "day to day, without thoughts of the future or of her past." Ruth and Cornelius nod to each other on the road, but they never speak. "What would they say to each other after so many years?" Cornelius wonders.

Cornelius's reticence is shared by most of the characters in the book, but Diamant's descriptive passages are as eloquent as a Congregationalist hymn ("the surf on distant boulders like a muffled knock on an enormous door"), and her theme -- that life teems even as it dwindles -- has all the more power for its subtle, unsentimental articulation. It is, in fact, the lack of sentimentality that betrays the novel's modernity. The period details all seem correctly placed: a scrap of gingham here, a wooden ladle there. Yet Diamant, who based her book on a local pamphlet and a sketchy collection of "ancient gossip and hearsay," makes no attempt to mask the contemporary sensibility that has set this story in motion. The vigorous feminism that galloped through The Red Tent is more subdued here, but it is unmistakably present.

In The Red Tent Diamant used a gaudy, Technicolor style to engineer her Old Testament visions of sex and violence, while The Last Days of Dogtown is as plain as sunlight on polished wood. But in both books, she has managed to find an appropriate (if not a true) vocabulary to conjure up a world. Like Las Vegas reproductions of old Venice or ancient Egypt, these novels are proudly inauthentic yet still entirely original.

Reviewed by Donna Rifkind
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
In The Last Days of Dogtown, Diamant paints a vivid and gripping historical setting as she delves into a lost crevice of human drama in 19th-century Massachusetts and renders it with a modern slickness. There are no novel revelations about love, however. Instead, she takes us alongside the drunkards, whores, and witches (the strongest character is Black Ruth, who rarely speaks), and, in the end, she evokes the tragic silliness of humanity in the grays and pale sunshine of Cape Ann.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

So Real it Will Make You Cry
It's rumored and many of the people in Gloucester, Massachusetts believe the folks over in Dogtown, a town that has been named for the pack of almost wild dogs who run free in the town that is hour's walk away, are witches, but they're not. They are simply outcasts, black folks, prostitutes, widows, drunks and the like. Folks they'd look down on, folks just trying to get by, dealing with the daily evils one might find if you are not gentry in 1814.

Dogtown is a small farming village by Cape Ann that failed to make it and so winds up being a town for those on the bottom rungs of society who mired in poverty or just plain lazy make do by selling berries or a brew the make from twigs and roots. However, their betters do not admire their endeavors, instead they make fun of them, call them trasheaters. In Dogtown those who can, get out.

We meet some of dogtown's residents at a funeral, like Ruth a black stonemason who happens to dress like a man (remember this is the early 1800s); a madam that is raising her grandson in her brothel; a couple of lesbian prostitutes among others; but the mourner who really grabs the reader's attention is Judy Rhines, a poor woman who had been abandoned by her father when she was eight years old. Judy is a sad and lonely woman who once had an affair with a freed slave, but she was forced to end the affair and now her heart only beats half the time. Her only companion now is one of the town dogs.

THE LAST DAYS OF DOGTOWN is a character study of the people mentioned above and others that will both take you back to a place in time where life was hard, sometimes cruel, often unfair and it make you glad you live when and where you do. Anita Diamant's people are sometimes too real, so real you want to cry, so real you will be thinking about them long after you finish this gorgeous story. Five stars from me.

Review Submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

So it's not The Red Tent... So what?
As you might suspect from reading the other reviews and descriptions, this is a historical novel set in the early 1800s in a small, dying town outside of coastal Gloucester, Massachusetts. After reading The Red Tent, then Good Harbor, one can really see that Diamant shines in historical fiction. Thankfully, though, Diamant does not attempt to make another book in the mold of The Red Tent. It is its own story, told in a much different manner. As a matter of fact, at times it does not feel like a story at all, but a collection of pictures of people (and some dogs) tied together by their common geography. We see birth and death, struggle and success, hatred and love, poor and rich, sin and virtue, faith and faithlessness. It is a complicated mess of stories mixed together with Diamant's beautiful grasp of the English language. She shows her ability to paint a masterpiece of truth and reality on a canvas of words, harsh and genuine words. Her most compelling narratives were those relating to the prostitutes of the town. She has a gift for allowing us to enter the hearts of her sinners. After all, we are all sinners.

Don't come to this looking for another Red Tent. And don't pick it up if you like a smooth, concrete plotline. But if you would like to be lost in another world for awhile, have your worldview challenged, and be left with many questions, then crack it open and dive in.

I took the chance . . . . and loved the book
So many times you read articles in national publications touting a book as one of the next big hits for the upcoming season and they turn out to be duds!

Well, this time I took a chance on Anita Diamant's newest novel "The Last Days of Dogtown" and it proved to be the real deal. I truly loved this book, as it was a throwback to so many novels of old. Today authors feel they have to go on for 500+ pages and at the end you have no true feelings for the characters of the book. But, in a mere 260 pages Diamant has provided us with many, many characters who are basically set forth in their own chapter of the book and you feel the need to keep constantly turning pages to see how the affairs of Dogtown turned out.

Diamant starts us out with a question from one of her main characters, Judy Rhines, a question as to why there was so little blood on a suicide victim, and from there introduces us to the main characters of the book in the very first chapter. Thereafter it is a story of those characters that compel us to keep on reading as she intertwines both the current state of that individual with stories of the past that help fill in some of the blanks that are in Dogtown.

It is not until almost at the very end that Judy finds out why there was so little blood, and this revelation came as a complete shock to me. For some reason I never saw it coming, nor did Diamant ever really dwell on that issue again for over 250 pages. Instead she kept us going with stories of so-called witches (Easter Carter) and evil relatives (Tammy Younger and Mrs. Stanley). From the few blacks who inhabited Dogtown we saw how that even in the so-called free North there truly was a stigma upon being black, with the local minister not wanting to preside at a funeral of the last black inhabitant of Dogtownuntil subtly coerced by Judy Rhines.

This book has brought forth characters that I will remember for a long time such as Easter Carter, Judy Rhines, Oliver Younger, John Woodsman a/k/a Black Ruth and many more. One of the more memorable chapters for me was a short passage about a local dog called Greyling. While not a total outcast in Dogtown, Greyling was not born to the town and never ascended to the top of the dog world, which was OK with him. He had his place and he knew it and liked it. Makes one think of our own towns and how difficult it is for newcomers to become part of a community.

In the end, this is just a lovely book that could have been any town in the US. It is a story that could be repeated in Boom Towns gone dry, Gold Rush villages, on little towns that just happened to be on the outskirts of a larger town, etc. It is a story of both the death of a town, as well as a story about those who "escaped" and made better lives for themselves. It is a story that will stay with me forever.


Blaine DeSantis