Lost Attractions of Georgia


Book Description

While Atlanta has been a major tourist destination since the Civil War, travelers rarely encountered the rest of Georgia unless they were on their way to Florida. That meant scores of attractions, motels, restaurants and gas stations sprang up along the major and minor routes, all vying for their own piece of those Yankee dollars. In Lost Attractions of Georgia, author Tim Hollis introduces us to such defunct sights as Storyland and the Georgia Game Park, as well as now-extinct elements of popular attractions, including Six Flags Over Georgia, Rock City, Stone Mountain Park and others.




Lost Attractions of Georgia


Book Description

While Atlanta has been a major tourist destination since the Civil War, travelers rarely encountered the rest of Georgia unless they were on their way to Florida. That meant scores of attractions, motels, restaurants and gas stations sprang up along the major and minor routes, all vying for their own piece of those Yankee dollars. In Lost Attractions of Georgia, author Tim Hollis introduces us to such defunct sights as Storyland and the Georgia Game Park, as well as now-extinct elements of popular attractions, including Six Flags Over Georgia, Rock City, Stone Mountain Park and others.




Georgia Discovered


Book Description

From the mountains to the coast, city streets to expansive farmland, modern skyscrapers to charming antebellum homes, author and photographer Chris Greer has explored the vibrant state of Georgia to bring you the very best locations. The book includes a tremendous variety of destinations and activities for even the most discerning traveler, including craft breweries, lush vineyards, secluded hiking trails, and historical icons. No matter what you’re interested in, visitors and residents alike will find plenty to love in this book. Greer’s decades of experience as a photographer are on display from the beginning, with fine art photography featured throughout. You may never look at another travel book the same way.




Literary Savannah


Book Description

An anthology of fiction and nonfiction about Savannah




Mysterious Georgia


Book Description

A plunge into Georgia history offers no shortage of bewilderment. UFOs, haunted bridges, ghost lights and monsters are just a smattering of the unexplained. At the Jekyll Island Club, a bellhop from the Roaring Twenties does his best to stay busy. A bright golden light hovers above the tracks of Macon and Brunswick Railroad, floating toward spectators before it just...turns off. From the obligatory mountain road 'Squatch sightings to Jimmy Carter's eerie encounter in a stand of Leary pines, Sherman Carmichael leads adventurous readers on a quest through baffling Georgia legends.




Lost Attractions of the Smoky Mountains


Book Description

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is among the most visited national parks in the country, and countless attractions around its borders have tried for decades to siphon some of those valuable tourist dollars. From ersatz western towns and concrete dinosaurs to misplaced Florida-type attractions and celebrity theaters, you will find them all preserved in this book. Author Tim Hollis showcases those businesses that no longer exist, from Hill-Billy Village in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg's theme parks on the Tennessee side to the motels of Cherokee and Ghost Town in the Sky on the North Carolina side.




The Lost Continent


Book Description

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.




Secret Atlanta: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure


Book Description

What’s really inside Atlanta’s sealed Crypt of Civilization? Where can you experience a midnight costume party or get your hair cut at a museum? And is there really an elephant graveyard in the city? Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and Secret Atlanta is the right book to prove this over and over again. Beyond the standard Atlanta tourist attractions, visitors and natives will find a city full of secrets—in the history, art, culture, nature, and places that are just plain weird. Tour the most hidden spots in the metro area, or see the famous sites through a new lens. You’ll find the answers to common questions, like why there are so many streets named “Peachtree.” Don’t miss Atlanta’s more uncommon quirks too, such as the story behind the clergy parking spaces at one local bar. Whether you’re a lifelong Atlantan or a first-time visitor, local writer Jonah McDonald will help you marvel at Atlanta’s most obscure oddities. His adventures through the city might sound too interesting to be true—but you couldn’t even make this stuff up if you tried.




Historic Silver Spring


Book Description

Images of America: Historic Silver Spring celebrates the community's past, beginning with founder Francis Preston Blair's 1840 discovery of the mica-flecked spring and the 1873 arrival of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Vintage photographs document the progressive growth of the "Main Streets," Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road, and the construction of the Silver Spring Armory and National Dry Cleaning Institute in 1927 and the Silver Theatre and Silver Spring Shopping Center in 1938. The volume culminates with modern pictures of downtown Silver Spring's 21st-century revitalization, which continues to preserve the past and secure the future of the area. In a pictorial journey through the community's Central Business District and bordering residential neighborhood, East Silver Spring, Historic Silver Spring honors the people and places that have come before.




In Search of the Lost Orient


Book Description

Olivier Roy is one of the world's leading experts on political Islam. But he is not only a scholar—he is also a traveler. Roy's keen and iconoclastic insights emerge from a lifetime of study combined with intrepid exploration through Afghanistan and Central Asia. In this book-length interview, Roy tells the lively and colorful story of his many adventures and discoveries in a variety of social and political settings and how they have come to shape his understanding of the Islamic world and its complex recent history. In Search of the Lost Orient is a candid, personal account of the experiences that led Roy to challenge his youthful ideas of an untouched, romanticized East and build a new intellectual framework to better understand and cohabit with the religions, politics, and cultures of the East, West, North, and South. In conversation with Jean-Louis Schlegel of the French magazine Esprit, Roy offers insight into the key themes of his career. Roy's immersion in the complexities of many Central Asian territories started him on his critique of the idea of an essentialized Islam. Alongside tales of backpacking from Paris to Kabul, his Afghan decade during the Soviet invasion, and official travel to post-Soviet Central Asia in the 1990s, Roy reflects on the nature of political and humanitarian engagement in this part of the world. He recounts his formative years, education, and developing political commitments and speaks to his evolving place within France's shifting intellectual and religious cultures. This book outlines Roy's lifelong practice—a combination of deliberate research goals and chance encounters—that examines Islam, immigration, and, more broadly, the future of cultures, religions, and secularism in the face of globalization. Both a significant intellectual autobiography and a compelling travelogue through some of the world's pivotal places, In Search of the Lost Orient offers a striking testimony to the many facets of an exceptional thinker.