Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 24, 1993 TAG: 9304240033
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER LEE PHILIPS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Now Yardley turns his attentive eye to the demographically problematic Mid-Atlantic, an area defined by a glossy magazine of the same name to include among its individual incarnations the states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Oh yes, and the District of Columbia.
The result is "States of Mind: A Personal Journey Through the Mid-Atlantic." The book is at once a regional odyssey, one replete with opinions that will create both agreeable nods and frowning exceptions, and a review of the memories and experiences of Yardley's rather interesting life at mid-century.
Tossing maps and WPA Guides into his luggage and firing up the engines of his new Ford Taurus SHO, purchased ostensibly for the present journey, Yardley sets off on familiar roads as a writer out to find his roots, for after all is said and done, Jonathan Yardley is a self-confessed "son of the Mid-Atlantic."
In Philadelphia, he shares the memory of his grandmother's funeral 20 years before and, reasserting a fixation on his own genealogy, visits the graves of his grandparents at the Episcopal Church of St. James the Less. A stop in Yardley, Pa., proves the old family town still holds distant relatives. Driving south, he marvels at the sheer incongruity of the American roadside, a pastoral scene of rolling hills and fertile fields that grow advertising billboards like so many wild onions. The trip to Williamsburg and Jamestown proves to be a contrast in the use and abuse of history.
Williamsburg, Yardley finds, reeks of history gone commercial, all theme park and shopping, while the Jamestown he recalls from a decade before, with its archaeological site authenticity, remains "the real thing . . . desolate but beautiful."
Finding himself in Raleigh, N.C., in November, 1990, Yardley observes the Gantt-Helms race and harkens back to his college days at Chapel Hill, where he was editor of the Daily Tarheel. He ponders the progress of race relations and observes the dramatic changes evident in North Carolina since he worked as an editorial writer for the Greensboro Daily News. He feasts on Piedmont barbecue.
As whimsicality sets in, Yardley sets off for an uncharacteristic trip to the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., where a short stretch with the one-armed bandit and a near perfect martini provide all the distinctions necessary to understand the east-coast gambler's paradise. He is later joined by his wife, Sue, for several days of comparative resort lodging at West Virginia's Greenbrier and Virginia's Homestead. Settling into character again, a short history of Roland Park, his beloved Baltimore neighborhood, looms large.
In a travelogue loaded with gas (speeding tickets!), food and lodging, and infectious criticism thereof, Yardley makes several emotional pilgrimages to places whose memories run deeper in the heart, including the Chapel Hill that is no longer his, and to Chatham, Va., where as a boy he learned early lessons about race relations and regional identity. What Yardley finds in his meandering journey is that for him, for his many personal experiences in all its individual places, this region called the Mid-Atlantic is indeed home.
\ "STATES OF MIND: A Personal Journey Through the Mid-Atlantic" By Jonathan Yardley. Villard Books. $23.
\ Christopher Lee Philips is a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C.
by CNB