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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
