Flight Path
A Search for Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the months leading up to the birth of her first child, Hannah Palmer discovers that all three of her childhood houses have been wiped out by the expansion of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Having uprooted herself from a promising career in publishing in her adopted Brooklyn, Palmer embarks on a quest to determine the fate of her lost homes—and of a community that has been erased by unchecked Southern progress.
Palmer's journey takes her from the ruins of kudzu-covered, airport-owned ghost towns to carefully preserved cemeteries wedged between the runways; into awkward confrontations with airport planners, developers, and even her own parents. Along the way, Palmer becomes an amateur detective, an urban historian, and a mother.
Lyrically chronicling the overlooked devastation and beauty along the airport’s fringe communities in the tradition of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Leslie Jamison, Palmer unearths the startling narratives about race, power, and place that continue to shape American cities.
Part memoir, part urban history, Flight Path: A Search for Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport is a riveting account of one young mother's attempt at making a home where there’s little home left.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this enjoyable memoir, Palmer explains that she's a product of the new South who craved a sense of place and therefore to her hometown of Atlanta. But she found it hard to go home again, as her three childhood houses are no longer there. Reluctantly at first, she took on the task of locating where they had stood; soon she became obsessed with understanding the mammoth impact of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL) on nearby communities over a half century. Her amateur sleuthing reveals unpleasant details about the insatiable appetite of a powerful economic engine like ATL, which acts as a Medusa that turns the area south of Atlanta to concrete. Palmer makes it easy to root for her and trust her candid insights into questionable policies and current efforts at "airport urbanism." The bigger question is how to confront her disheartening analysis of postwar America's incessant progress, and "the cost of all that's been lost" in Atlanta's march to modernity.
