from the Little a to Big A: Watching Atlanta Grow Outside In

A boy in Griffin sits forty miles south of Atlanta and watches a letter on a cap become a city.This is not a civic history. It is not a brochure. It is cheap seats, the drive up 19/41, a sister's shuttle office on Whitehall, a warehouse radio, a park that learned it could be hurt in public, and the rooms that never made the news.M. Lawrence Phillips grew up in a mill town that still ran on railroad tracks and rumor. Atlanta was the place you reached by going north through Hampton, Jonesboro, and Riverdale until the road dumped you onto 285. He saw the Braves when the cap still wore a lowercase a. He saw the city when the stadium still had empty seats. He saw what the cameras did not bother with: freight docks, airport vans, a hospital bed in a living room, concrete cubes cut from columns that were supposed to hold an aquarium, and a third rail people do not notice until somebody tells them it will kill them.From Hank Aaron's week in 1974 to the night Centennial Park exploded in 1996, this book stays on the south side of the map. Griffin stays Griffin. Atlanta keeps adding rooms. The little a becomes the Big A.Some names are changed. The streets are not.