Great Works of Non-Fiction

Whenever anyone asks me for a recommendation for a good book about Atlanta, I always suggest Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn by Gary Pomerantz. Tracing the intertwining family histories of two of the Atlanta's most important mayors, Ivan Allen, Jr. and Maynard Jackson, Pomerantz reveals almost everything one needs to know to understand the distinctive nature of our city.

If the seeker wants more, I generally suggest Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing. Because its focus is so much more specific, it's not as easy to consider this a book "about" Atlanta in the same way as Pomerantz's, but its portrait of mid-twentieth century Atlanta--just as it is about to burst into the behemoth it became--is so alive and real that I can't recommend it highly enough.



What both of these writers share, besides the Atlanta connection, is the understanding that great truths about big topics come from intimate, personality-driven storytelling. And that for their type of storytelling to have the kind of sweep it has requires thorough, painstaking research.

For the same writer to contain both of these abilities (research and storytelling) in the degree these two have is rare. It makes sense that the two of them are friends.

So it was with great excitement that I learned yesterday that Melissa Fay Greene will introduce Gary Pomerantz at his book signing on Monday, June 22 at the Carter Center.

Pomerantz's latest book, The Devil's Tickets, is another tour de force, weaving the stories of a cast of fascinating people, some famous at the time, some not, to give a great portrait of America at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the Great Depression.

When the question arises about what certain people prefer to read, fiction or non-fiction, it sometimes seems like a false choice. In the hands of writers as skilled as Pomerantz and Greene, non-fiction shares all the traits of the great fiction: compelling stories whose meaning transcends their specific details.