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Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns, by Donald Harington
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A book full of exquisite historical and personal detail, of authentic American lore and American speech. This is the story of eleven towns in Arkansas, relics of a time when the dreams of city builders were boundless. Photographs and maps. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
- Sales Rank: #2315598 in Books
- Published on: 1986-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 490 pages
Amazon.com Review
Let Us Build Us a City is a group portrait of 11 "lost towns" in Donald Harington's native Arkansas. Yet this is no mere backwoods travelogue. His book, the author tells us, is "the story of communities that aspired to dignity and achieved serenity." These are towns, in other words, whose ambitious founders never quite managed to merge imagination with reality. "How does a once-flourishing town aspiring to call itself 'City' endure the long days of its decline?" asks Harington. The answer, in most cases, is quite well--though not perhaps in the way its inhabitants intended. One need not be familiar with Arkansas to appreciate this tour of lonely highways; there are lost towns everywhere. But seldom are they explored with such joy and wonder as in this gem of a book.
For all its brilliance, Let Us Build Us a City is nearly impossible to classify. It fuses the travel narrative with history and cultural studies--yet it reads like a novel. It's also a love story that is in no way fictional. Harington begins with a letter from a woman named Kim, who writes to praise his earlier book, Some Other Place, the Right Place. (Since the latter work is itself about a young couple's exploration of ghost towns and their subsequent romance, things immediately get off to a metafictional start.) Kim's letter leads to regular correspondence, in which she details the research she's conducting in one-horse towns throughout Arkansas. The author encourages her, she inspires him, and they agree to collaborate on a book--this one. By the time they meet, they too have learned something of expectation and hope. (Yes, they do get married, although you'll have to read the acknowledgments for details of the ceremony.)
Ultimately, Harington's book is a search for the spirit of each individual place--which is to say, the people. These lost towns are populated by dreamers, outcasts, prevaricators, drunks, madmen, and hermits. There are tales of floods, fires, gold rushes, gunshots, feuds, booms and (mostly) busts, along with other tidbits so strange they could only be true. By themselves, these would be deeply entertaining yarns. In Harington's hands, however, they amount to eloquent requiems for all his stunted cities. And perhaps these Arkansans traded in their dashed dreams for something better. After all, serenity is an admirable quality in a town, even if it happens to be an accidental one. --Shawn Carkonen
From Library Journal
Writer Harington enlisted the aid of a high school teacher, a fan of his, to tape record her way around these small Arkansas towns whose common theme is simply that their current situations do not meet former expectations. The natives, including many mayors and law enforcement officials, relate the histories and local lore about the founders, settlers, and Indians of the past and the peculiar and not so peculiar characters of today. Murders, moonshining, race relations, entrepreneurial successes and failures, and Civil War stories loom large. Some of the individual stories and several brief asides (bluegrass music, cyclones, leaving home, etc.) are riveting, but generally the interest is regional. Also, Harington too frequently repeats verbatim his partner's questions, a boring technique. Photographs and maps not seen. Roger W. Fromm, Bloomsburg Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother's hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers. His academic career was in art and art history because, although determined to become a novelist (he wrote his first one at six), he felt that his ultimate teaching vocation should not interfere with his writing. He has taught art history at a variety of colleges in New York, New England, South Dakota and finally at his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for fifteen years in the same room where he first took courses in art history. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim. His first novel, THE CHERRY PIT, about Little Rock, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published twelve other novels, most all of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. These include LIGHTNING BUG, SOME OTHER PLACE. THE RIGHT PLACE., THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ARKANSAS OZARKS, THE CHOIRING OF THE TREES, and, most recently, THIRTEEN ALBATROSSES. He has also written books about artists. He won the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of Arkansas Library Association. John Guilds in his anthology, ARKANSAS, ARKANSAS, wrote, "if Miller Williams ranks as the greatest poet born, bred, nurtured, and still living in Arkansas, Donald Harington is by the same standards Arkansas's greatest novelist." The Winter 2002 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY is a "Donald Harington Special Issue" with tributes from fellow novelists, scholarly essays, interviews, and a selection of his forty-year correspondence with William Styron.
Most helpful customer reviews
32 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
An American classic.
By jrossa@javanet.com
In this odd mix of travelogue, Americana, love story and history, Donald Harington shows us not just lost cities and lost people and places, but what he calls "lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul". And the beautiful thing, the redemption, is that these places aren't lost. In Harington's elegant prose they live on, and will live on as long as this book is read. It deserves to be read in every American history class in the country, because in this book his remembrances and his curiosity open new worlds, just next to and behind this one. Towards the end, when he includes a poem by Richard Hugo, it's as if he's bottled something inside you that you felt but didn't know. A tremendous achievement of remembrance.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Different
By KD
The writing itself is excellent. The book isn't sure what kind of book it wants to be, and takes too long to figure it out. I got this as an e-book. It includes photos, which were not clear on the Kindle, and that was disappointing as the pictures were referenced in the story. I was glad to get to the end.
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
A Treasure Found Off the Beaten Path
By C. Ebeling
It gives me faith in the publishing industry to find this wonderful book still in print. Donald Harington was an established Arkansas novelist when a reader named Kim wrote him out of the blue expressing the inspiration she drew from one of his stories. Harington was lecturing out of state at the time but he responded with encouragement for a project looking into the history of Arkansas places that had "City" in the name and were anything but. So, Kim took off, doing the leg work and dispatching her findings to Harington who eventually shaped them into this symphony of historical fact and human tragedies and comedies. As soon has he was able, he caught up with Kim and the two became instant soul mates. Their own story is woven into this unique blend of fact and imaginative invocation of original intentions and relinquished dreams. A pleasure to read, it sparks curiosity about the cities that never grew up in your own state (the author includes a state by state list) and a desire to go learn their stories. This is a unique story, very human, very American.
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