"Patapsco is a portrait of a region as seen through the memories of its elders, the eyes of a photographer, and the sensibilities of a writer and oral historian. Through narrative and images, it reveals the connections between culture and place, between past and present. Also, cloaked in the regional nature of Patapsco is a larger issue: disappearing American places. This book documents only one region, but it speaks for all those disappearing places and their people whose lives and times have not been documented. Our culture must not let unique American spaces fade to dust. We must find ways to preserve them, if only doing so in the pages of a book." - W. Ralph Eubanks, Director of Publishing, Library of Congress "This book is yet another expression of the careful social observations Walker Evans and James Agee offered in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Patapsco Valley, Maryland, thereby has joined the lucky company of Hale County, Alabama - both places that become, in the hands of an alert photographer and an attentive writer, something quite else: social texts that keep helping us find ourselves.... A valley's portrait becomes an aspect of a nation's ongoing story.... To Alison Kahn and Peggy Fox, then, for giving us Patapsco, we owe gratitude for a splendid, observing effort exceedingly well done, but also for the compelling summons they tender us; through meeting these Marylanders, we get a boost toward ourselves - our similar journey through time and space in America." - From the introduction, by Robert Coles"
