Maryland Lost and Found: People and Places from Chesapeake to Appalachia (review)

knowledge defined by Flannery O'Connor in "The Fiction Writer and His Country" (Mystery and Manners): "To know oneself is to know one's region...to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against truth, and not the other way around." In spite of the admirable qualities of this book and its goal I hope that similar ventures are kept to a minimum. I would not, in other words, like to see such a volume for every state in the union. Though we don't believe it can happen here, we have seen it happen elsewhere on our planet with such frequency as to give us pause if not to create alarm: the writer becoming the "social engineer," the apostle of progress and the singer of a state-edited past. It might be well for all our writers in the region, in addition to remembering Auden's advice, "thou shaU not sit with statisticians or do social science," to consider another little caveat, "Thou shall Umit the number of pieces written in connection with official celebrations." From the Renaissance we know that patronage and art can bear lasting fruit, but it is a relationship fraught with danger. Science, as we all know, has been completely conquered by politicians and arbiters of culture. It would be an unspeakable tragedy if the same should ever happen to art, especially literature, whose eternal purpose is to make us see and feel, to laugh and cry, to reveal and praise, and to teach us, at least on some occasions, to say no. —Robert J. Higgs Meyer, Eugene L. Maryland Lost and Found: People and Placesfrom Chesapeake to Appalachia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Hardback, $16.95. This book is a nicely written survey of Maryland by a 30-year, veteran reporter for the Washington Post. For over a decade Meyer's beat has been the state of Maryland. "From the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel to the Appalachian backwoods, he has travelled it all," says the book's publicist. Perhaps that is the trouble with the book—it attempts to be more than a travelogue with journalistic insight, yet it never leaves the perspective of Washington. The result is neither Ralph McGiIl nor Frederick Law Olmstead; neither Josephus Daniels nor Wilma Dykeman. Meyer takes us from the Baltimore Harbor to the Old South country of the Eastern Shore; from Annapolis' thriving seafront to the mountains of Garrett County; from Route One to the vanishing islands of the Chesapeake; from DickeyviUe, the elite "Land of the Gentry" to the poor of KitzmiUer, a decaying mine town. Meyer rightfully claims that "to write about Maryland is...to write about America [for] within its borders is a generous slice of the American pie: megalopolis, Appalachia, the Chesapeake Bay, the Deep South, the industrial North..." Meyer is at his best when he guides us to spots where urbanization is most dramatically in process; and he traces this change across the thirty years of his tenure with the Post. Marylanders commute to Washington and Baltimore across the entire state; no part of Maryland is exempt from the process. Meyer's best chapter is on "The Metropolitan Frontier," which he skillfully traces by following the growth of Buckeyetown near Frederick, and the life and struggles of Mitchellville in Prince George County. The author claims that urbanization is "happening across Maryland's megalopolis, from the foothills of Appalachia to the Chesapeake shores." 67 Meyer is not the first to report this phenomenon, but he does it very skillfully. A New Yorker and Columbia University graduate, who as an undergraduate learned of history as a "way from the past to the present," Meyer does deal with the American past, but rather thinly in the years prior to 1930. His treatment of Maryland reminds one of Byron Crawford's columns in the Louisville CourierJournal , which emphasize startling events or persons, rather than John Parris's columns in the Asheville Citizen, which somehow capture the essence of a region by his choice of persons and events. Perhaps this is because Parris writes about a less complex mix of individuals and events than reporters who see life from...