Celebrating Boston: The Classroom Of The Real

I went to Boston in search of real life and Transcendentalism and the wisdom of the seasons -- the grit of a tough, small, resilient red-brick city -- and I was never disappointed. I'd grown up between my parents' home in California and my schools in England, and when I graduated from college, I wanted to see what might be in the middle, not quite wide-open and not quite cloistered. Where better to land than Boston?