Flight Path: A Search for Roots Beneath the World’s Busiest Airport

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. (Apr.)