John Margolies: Roadside America Book

Growing up as I did in a shifting time where Americana is being prized as art but still simultaneously torn and replaced with personalityless apartment complexes, banks, and strip plazas - I absolute prize this book. Visually, it's a tour de force, but even the introduction and the subsequent paragraphs here and there are luminous and thought-provoking. I've not yet read Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" - I tried so many times, hoping for wanderlust and nomadism, and couldn't find it or get into it. Yet all of that is swirling here and in the Library of Congress' entire catalog on Margolies. I bought two versions - the one with the giant Land-Before-Time-looking green brontosaurus on the front, and the Taschen one translated into English, German, and French tidbits, with the toothy Gatorland door on it. Each version has different photos and sections, but the same central theme of preserving the America of eons past, a slow, homey, kind of Pleasantville vibe that is becoming more remote. I think the introduction opining Margolies as a kind of Herodotus was a very apt comparison. Thank God my father took me to eat Moon Soup and homemade vichyssoise at the Chalet Suzanne before it closed its doors in August 2014; thank God my mother stopped at Dinosaur World on the way to Tampa that one summer so I could experience Jurassic Park without the soundtrack that frightened me. Thank God my husband loves these kinds of places as much as I do, and allows me to stop there, savor, and reflect. Margolies past away some years ago, but through his inimitable body of work, his spirit lives on, and I enjoyed becoming acquainted with this architectural and photographical pioneer through these volumes.