States of Mind: A Personal Journey Through the Mid-Atlantic

A New Yorker until he was nine, when his family moved to Virginia, Yardley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the Washington Post , was considered a Yankee by southerners and a Rebel by northerners. This identity problem was compounded by the facts that his family had strong roots in Baltimore and that he spent his college years in North Carolina. But a magazine assignment to write on the mid-Atlantic region gave Yardley a sense of his true identity, as reflected in this book, which is at once a subjective and a sociological account of his travels through the region from New Jersey to Virginia. Using classic WPA guidebooks as his factual mentors, along with his own place memories and more contemporary resources, Yardley follows old roads, stops at new malls and famous beaches, observes the locals, discusses regional economies, comments on hotels and restaurants, deplores vanished landmarks, assesses their replacements and generally provides a reliable and thoughtful travelogue. (Apr.)