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Vanishing America: The End of Main Street Diners, Drive-Ins, Donut Shops, and Other Everyday Monuments | 
 enlarge | Authors: Michael Eastman, William H. Gass
Creator: Douglas Brinkley
Publisher: Rizzoli
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
Buy New: $23.73
You Save: $16.22 (41%)
New (20) Used (3) from $23.73
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 16343
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.6
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 9.5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0847830403
Dewey Decimal Number: 770
EAN: 9780847830404
ASIN: 0847830403
Publication Date: April 29, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new book. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling books online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080516225610T
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Product Description
Think of the quirky buildings you pass every day but whose quiet beauty you take for granted—the moviehouses, juke joints, soda fountains, barbershops, roadside diners, and storefront churches. You don’t miss them until they’re gone. As suburban sprawl and strip malls conquer the country, these vestiges of a lost way of life are falling under the wrecking ball. Here the photographer Michael Eastman has made the ultimate road trip, crisscrossing the nation dozens of times, to capture these buildings on film before they vanish. These dreamy images call us to question what we choose to let go in the wake of contemporary life, with a cool melancholy that evokes the work of Edward Hopper, Jack Kerouac, and William Eggleston. There is a wry sense of humor here as well. The book delights in the idiosyncracies of America’s vernacular styles, ranging from Depression Deco to New England clapboard in random juxtapositions that accrue over time in a town’s landscape. Countless visual puns arise among the book’s many detailed images of signs and statuettes. Vanishing America catalogues great everyday American architecture and design. But it also offers a provocative portrait of the silent emptiness that has descended upon vanishing small communities everywhere.
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| Customer Reviews:
Catch 'em while you can April 29, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
The subtitle to this fascinating book is The End of Main Street and Michael Eastman has taken it upon himself to record as much of it as possible before progress or neglect flattens what's left. Flick through the pages and you'll see more than two hundred shots of small town commonplace. The five chapters (Theaters, Churches, Hangouts, Doors, Signs, Stores, Services, Autos, Hotels and Restaurants) pretty much cover what you'll see in any town across the country.
Nearly every photo is an exterior and I thought one of the strengths of Eastman's work is the no-nonsense straight-on compositions. These buildings with their signs, peeling paint or structural modifications are visually intriguing enough not to require odd angles, soft focus or other gimmicks and even though they are photos of record the rich color and choice of subject lifts the contents of the book above similar photography.
The book's production is as impressive as the photos, the square format, matt art paper and 175 screen all come together beautifully. Four stars? Though the book was designed by Pentagram it does have, in my view, a rather annoying fault: there are several pages where photos are butted together which makes for initial visual confusion and I think weakens each relevant photo. A thin black or white line, just to give the minimum separation, would have solved the problem. Fortunately most pages don't have butted photos and on the rest the photos are allowed to sparkle by themselves and they do.
***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.
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