A thoughtful, eclectic account of what infrastructure progress can leave in its wake.
A young writer retraces her search for former homes lost to a unique form of urban sprawl.
In her debut memoir, Palmer, an Atlanta-based urban designer with an MFA in creative writing, returns to her Georgia roots to explore what remains of the houses of her youth. Daphne du Maurier’s famous line from Rebecca, “we can never go back again, that much is certain,” takes on literal weight here as the author discovers that all three of her family homes were swallowed up by the encroachment of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. It is considered the world’s busiest airport; the author reports that in 2014, Hartsfield-Jackson “averaged a quarter million passengers each day, roughly 2,500 daily arrivals and departures…something like three flights per minute.” In 1961, Atlanta opened the biggest passenger terminal in the country, and, at that time, the airport boasted the familiar “giant ‘X’ ” configuration of two runways that “could not be duplicated or extended.” When the airport soon became overcrowded, a new master plan scrapped the conventional “criss-cross runways” and “starfish-shaped” terminal for a “series of parallel east/west runways” and linear terminals that increased the land area “fivefold,” leading to its present-day 4,700-acre footprint. Arguing that “everyone uses the airport,” but “no one sees it,” on her return to Atlanta, Palmer originally thought the disappearance of one of the communities she grew up in had something to do with gentrification, where socio-economics or “racial anxiety” played into the desire of certain citizens to be “ ‘comfortably south’ of people that didn’t look like them.” But the more she researched the town’s decline and fall, the more she realized the airport’s flight path had “carved an invisible freeway over Forest Park.” Throughout, Palmer’s clear, engaging prose effectively combines her private-eye–like adventures with emotional discoveries made as she comes to terms with moments and structures erased from her past.
A thoughtful, eclectic account of what infrastructure progress can leave in its wake.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938235-28-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
