States of Mind: A Personal Journey Through the Mid-Atlantic

I recognize the possibility that I enjoyed this book more than will others because I too am a crusty WASP, a book lover, and a baseball fan, and, perhaps most importantly, as Jonathan Yardley says of himself, "I am a son of the Mid-Atlantic". But I suspect most readers will enjoy the ride as Mr. Yardley takes us along on his journey, which wends from Yardley, PA where he searches for signs of some lingering family connection, throughout the region that also includes Delaware, Washington, DC, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland, where the book ends with his plaintive meditations on the soon to be departed Memorial Stadium, longtime home of his beloved Baltimore Orioles. It is the unfortunate nature of this disparate agglomeration of states that even at the end of the book they still seem totally random, rather than resembling anything like a cohesive section of the country. But even if they don't cohere, they each seem interesting in their own way as presented here. GRADE : B+