Customer Reviews

Let Us Build Us A City: Eleven Lost Towns

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

Award-winning author Donald Harington originally published Let Us Build Us a City in 1986; now in a beautiful new edition, this thoughtful collection of stories about eleven forgotten small towns in Arkansas remains a pristine glimpse into history. Some of the forgotten towns gradually dwindled and declined to little more than a church, a post office, a general store, a gas station, and a handful of residents; other overlooked towns were never terribly memorable to begin with. Donald Harington learned of these towns' stories through his connection with a researcher named Kim, and eventually Harrington and Kim fell in love. Let Us Build a City is a contemplative look at the joy and wonder to be discovered in hidden Arkansas history, and as enjoyable to read today as it was over twenty years ago.

Ah, this book was a delight. A couple of relatives of mine are in the 'Cherokee City' section. They are no longer with us, so it was good to see their stories in print. I've read this book twice. During my second pass through it, I actually re-created the trip around Arkansas, and was able to find most of the buildings that were pictured in the book. They have aged a lot in the last 20+ years, as have we all. Please, reader, pick this book up and read it. You will not regret it.

An extremely interesting synopsis of the birth, life, and death of eleven Arkansas communities at one time aspiring to own the coveted label of "city," this book is all the more interesting if you have had the chance to have travelled through several of these mere wide spots in the road on occasion. While the author's incessant tangents seem to be the product of a deep seated need for a vehicle with which to exhibit his wealth of worldly knowledge, this annoyance aside, his ability to raise common people to the rank of folk heroes, if only on a local scale, is indeed unsurpassed.

I was always confounded by my parents love for the Ozarks. When they retired and built their dream home in Bull Shoals, Arkansas, it seemed the most unlikely place to live out the end of their lives. It was impossible to get to without a 3 leg journey by commercial airline, puddle jumper and car. I was only able to visit them about 4 times in their 15 years there. This novel explores the same territory through the eyes of two history lovers, and reveals the reasons why my parents loved the area so much they were both willing to die there. The writing is as unique and beautiful as the folk-lore found in the bluffs and valleys around the White and Arkansas Rivers.

I loved reading about these lost towns of Arkansas. They're the story of little depopulated, abandoned towns all over the country. The author tells the stories of the ambitious charactors who built the towns and of their hopes, the boomdays and the slow abandonment as the movers and shakers continued to move west, leaving decaying buildings and a handful of old timers who remained and remembered the glory days of their youth. This book is so good, you can almost hear the sounds of hatchets felling timber and boats lumbering up and down the rivers.

I was intrigued by the title of the book so went to the 'quick view' to read a portion of said book. Here's my take: This is (at best) poor, undisciplined writing. To be fair, I only read the first 4 or 5 pages however, that in itself was a task. The writer strayed around the subject so often that I couldn't help but wonder if this was a book he wrote that paid by the word. The topic is very interesting and I'm sure that had the author been given legitimate editorial guidance the book had the potential to be a wonderful journey. As it is, I wouldn't buy this at any price - too difficult to follow much less to read.

I have not yet read this book and can't say if I ever will. I purchased it to see how and whether or not it would work. It helped me to learn some things about how to purchase books from Amazon and how to manipulate my Kindle.