STATIONS: An Imagined Journey
This unusual story-with-pictures is a wonderfully evocative celebration of ordinary places and people, layered with beauty, meaning, poetry and nostalgia. The volume purports to be the photographic album-cum-diary of Russell McKay, a Baltimore brakeman killed in a train crash in 1982, and it features 39 color images of two old railroads-the Powhatan and the Buffalo & Shenandoah-running through Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. McKay's haunting "photographs" of trains, tracks and trestles-a vista of backyard America's row houses, factories, bridges, woods, coal yards-are actually paintings by Flanagan, who grew up in Baltimore. The "album" is embellished with wry commentaries by Russell's cousin, Lucius Canton, a Baltimore reporter who's become a Virginia farmer, as well as with excerpts from old newspapers, diaries and dictionaries compiled by Anna Caton, Lucius's eccentric recluse sister, a painter who once had an affair with Russell. Lucius's reminiscences juxtapose the doings of six generations of his family against history's horrors-white settlers' seizure of Indians' sacred sites, the Civil War, Hitler's rise to power, Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. The result is a cunning act of preservation excavating what is best in the American character and way of life-and a memorable, achingly beautiful book.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.