Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn

Those heading to Atlanta for the Summer Olympics could hardly take along a better companion than Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, an entertainingly narrated saga of two families — one black, one white — whose destinies comprise an intimate history of the Georgia capital. By telling the tale of the Allens and the Dobbses, ancestors of the city's two most important mayors, Gary M. Pomerantz animates the cultural and political forces that combined to produce the civil rights revolution — which transformed Atlanta from a smug, self-important provincial town to a city of international importance. Granted, the author — a journalist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution — sometimes doesn't know when to quit. Okay, so the police department was motorized in 1925. Do readers really need to know the names of Atlanta's four retiring police horses? Probably not — but as the details pile up, they form a remarkably coherent view of the lives and times of the leaders whose actions and interactions, fraught with drama and peril, changed the face of the South, and of the nation. B+