The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 January 2013
by Harlan Hambright
It is in the nature of people in new places to give these places names that invoke familiarity and the comforts of home. We still name places on faraway planets after the characters from our mythology and even from our fiction. In America, the relatively recent pattern of settlement has given us countless locations named after places from which our ancestors set forth in the Old World. Familiar American town names turn up all over the world map. Anyone who has traveled across the United States is familiar with the experience of coming across some small, forgotten town with a grand name. Paris, Idaho. London, New Hampshire. Poland, Maine. Dublin, California. And Dublin, Georgia, too. This book is a collection of those grandly-named cities and towns and abandoned wide spots in the road found in the state of Georgia. There are a few dozen here, from Ithaca to Amsterdam, Hamburg to Scotland, Athens to Cuba. Each is represented by a couple of excellent photographs by this author who is, by background, an architectural photographer. And each is given a small background, giving us a sense of the town's origin and its state today. Along the way, Hambright overlays the tale with his light amusing frame of a modern Odysseus traveling to the many exotic locations of his long journey before returning home. Some of those place names appear here, too: Ithaca, Athens, Smyrna, Homer. This is a light touch by the author. The book is primarily a photographic journey, with short bits on the history. It is certainly not exhaustive. And a lot of the towns shown are decaying and faded, if not on the brink of vanishing altogether. So there is a moody kind of ruin tourism here, the romance of faded towns with grand names and, possibly, grand dreams. Then again, the author also avoids the strip malls, liquor supermarkets and big box stores that litter these towns today. The currents of economy and migration decide whether a city does well, so that New York is the biggest city in the country, while Rome, Georgia is just a little spot in the rural South. Donald Harington explored similar territory in his Let us Build us a City, exploring towns with the word "City" in their names, the places people might once have dreamed would become great cities. This book, odd and postcard-like as it is, is an excellent companion to Harington's work. If you're not looking it up on-line, it seems the most likely place to find it is in some Georgia bookshops.
See also: [Let us Build us a City by Donald Harington]
[Other Urban History and Architecture]