Vanishing America, the end of Main Street diners, drive-ins, donut shops, and other everyday monuments.  A unique look at all of the yesteryear buildings that made America what it is today.  While modern architecture gives a crisp and clean feeling, this photographic essay of America's past evokes a slightly different emotion.  Telling a story with hundreds of beautiful photographs, this book puts life into lifeless buildings.  The author and photographer Michael Eastman has traveled the country many times to capture these images and keep alive America's  fading past.

     According to Douglas Brinkley, who wrote the forward to this book, Eastman, a native St. Louisian, "has captured here the hardcore essence of blue-smoked architectural loneliness better than any other new artist...Remnants of the past, Eastman seems to tell us, can still be recovered in the most unlikely places."  One editorial review says, "Think of the quirky buildings you pass every day but whose quiet beauty you take for granted—the movie houses, juke joints, soda fountains, barbershops, roadside diners, and storefront churches. You don’t miss them until they’re gone. As suburban sprawl and strip malls conquer the country, these vestiges of a lost way of life are falling under the wrecking ball. Here the photographer Michael Eastman has made the ultimate road trip, crisscrossing the nation dozens of times, to capture these buildings on film before they vanish. These dreamy images call us to question what we choose to let go in the wake of contemporary life, with a cool melancholy that evokes the work of Edward Hopper, Jack Kerouac, and William Eggleston. There is a wry sense of humor here as well. The book delights in the idiosyncrasies of America’s vernacular styles, ranging from Depression Deco to New England clapboard in random juxtapositions that accrue over time in a town’s landscape. Countless visual puns arise among the book’s many detailed images of signs and statuettes. Vanishing America catalogues great everyday American architecture and design. But it also offers a provocative portrait of the silent emptiness that has descended upon vanishing small communities everywhere."

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