Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, Gary M. Pomerantz
Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, Gary M. Pomerantz
2 Rating(s)
List: $39.99 | Sale: $28.00
Club: $19.99

Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn
The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta

Author: Gary M. Pomerantz

Narrator: Kevin R. Free

Unabridged: 25 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/20/2022


Synopsis

“A magnificent piece of writing, a beautiful tapestry of prose in which the stories of two of Atlanta’s most celebrated families have been woven densely into the history of the city itself.” —The New York Times

The Intersection of Peachtree Street, historically the residential and commercial street of Atlanta’s white elite, and Sweet Auburn Avenue, the spiritual main street of Atlanta’s community, mirrors the often separate but mutually dependent worlds of whites and blacks in this Southern city. In Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, Gary M. Pomerantz traces five generations of two families—the Allens, descended from slave owners, and the Dobbses, from slaves. These families produced the two most influential mayors of the modern South, Ivan Allen Jr., and Maynard Jackson Jr.

Through hundreds of interviews and five years of painstaking research, Pomerantz shows how the families rose to social, economic, and political prominence. But he also demonstrates how their interesting lives paralleled the shifting relations between Atlanta’s blacks and whites as the city grew to become the capital of the New South. It is a representative story of the transformation of a city and the entire south.

About Gary M. Pomerantz

Gary M. Pomerantz is a nonfiction author and journalist and has served the past seven years as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Pomerantz has written four books, including Their Life’s Work and the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nick on April 01, 2013

my response to this was/is pretty complicated, and i'll need let it marinate a minute before i really review this. well-written and a pleasure to plow through, though by no means fantastically well-written; i was pretty disappointed, given the book's reputation. there's a much better history of twen......more

Goodreads review by Emi on January 13, 2013

Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn is a 624-page history of a section of Atlanta and four generations of 2 politically prominent Atlanta families, one (the Allens) white and one (the Dobbs) black. At one point a businessman describes a meeting with Mayor Maynard Jr. as follows: "consisted of somebod......more

Goodreads review by Brandon on January 11, 2013

This is a great book about Atlanta and its history as told through the families of the last two-term white mayor of Atlanta (his successor lost) and the first black mayor of the city. Pomerantz does a good job of showing the complicated racial dynamics of "the city too busy to hate," and how both wh......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on January 26, 2010

Good historical narrative. I highly recommend for anyone interested in the history of Atlanta, moderately recommend for anyone interested in race relations histories, and do not recommend for any other groupn of readers. I enjoyed learning more about my adopted home town. It could have been shorter.......more

Goodreads review by Dave on May 06, 2024

I sought out this book because I know the author, and enjoyed his books on Wilt Chamberlain and the old Boston Celtics, and because my daughter moved to Atlanta. I didn’t know what to expect and at first was a bit intimidated by its length (554 pages) and how dense the pages were. The book is about......more