Reviews

If you ve forgotten or perhaps never knew just how much Charlotte has transformed itself in recent years, 27 Views of Charlotte: The Queen City in Prose & Poetry offers a keen literary reminder.

This new collection, a mix of history, essays, fiction and poems, is the sixth volume in a successful series from Eno Publishers. Each book portrays a city through the perspectives of 27 local writers.

Hillsborough-based Eno Publishers launched the 27 Views series in 2010 with 27 Views of Hillsborough. When that book proved a hit, the press continued the series with Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, Asheville and now Charlotte. Two more 27 Views collections, on Greensboro and coastal Carolina, are in the works.

Much of Charlotte s story is about progress, and Jack Claiborne, a retired Charlotte Observer associate editor, provides a fine primer on the subject with his introduction. Charlotte, he writes, has striven to catch the next wave in hopes of becoming the first, the biggest, the best, the tallest, the most admired, or whatever other superlative was available.

Since progress often means supplanting old with new, it s not surprising that several pieces celebrate defunct landmarks, such as Eastland Mall and the Coffee Cup, the diner where black and white, rich and poor, enjoyed their collards and fried chicken while sitting shoulder to shoulder.

The egalitarianism of it all took me by surprise and gave me an appreciation that I otherwise didn t have for the buttoned-down city of bankers I had just moved to, Observer Associate Editor Fannie Flono writes.

In an essay titled A Sense of Place, novelist Mark de Castrique describes a family farm dating to the 1700s that was about to be replaced by a parking lot for airport travelers. Fewer than eight miles from downtown Charlotte, he writes, the Bigham farm had survived a revolution, a civil war, a depression, but not prosperity. --Pam Kelley, Charlotte Observer