A MAN IN FULL.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew
• Position: Review

Tom Wolfe shows he can write with depth and sympathy

A MAN IN FULL By Tom Wolfe Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $28.95

I found it hard not to love Atlanta when I lived there from 1990 to 1993 as a reporter. This was not an exotic foreign assignment along the lines of Hong Kong or Johannesburg, but I always treated it as such--much to the amusement of many of my friends, most of whom only ventured from the city's mammoth airport to its Sunbelt downtown. Indeed, a lot of visitors only see the icy sterility of the downtown area, which more or less empties after 5 p.m. Still, there was much to absorb outside the central business district, with its huge buildings by John Portman, the architect-developer who made the big hotel atrium a staple of the American landscape. For me, Atlanta held pleasures that were aesthetic and intriguing. There were the neighborhoods: Lush enclaves like Lullwater where "Driving Miss Daisy" was filmed; quasi-hippie enclaves like Little Five Points and the Mecca of black success, Atlanta University, which includes Morehouse college. I liked the eccentricities of the place. You could go to a dinner party and meet two women named Ginger. You could be in the mountains where "Deliverance" was set in two hours.

But the most intriguing thing, I thought, was the Atlanta ethos about race. Atlanta has no fewer racial woes than other cities. Demographers will tell you that the housing patterns in Atlanta are more like Chicago's than Charleston's--decidedly segregated in the tradition of northern cities rather than southern cities that, even under Jim Crow, have had far less spatial separation. (In fact, the more strict the Jim Crow laws, the less whites in the segregated South seemed to worry about blacks living near them.) Atlanta even had its own mini-riot after the Rodney King verdict in 1992. I was near the melee at the time, which left one man in a coma.

But for the most part Martin Luther King, Jr.'s hometown has had a smoother racial history than other cities. It was not torn by riots in the '60s as Detroit and Newark were. In 1964 the city's mayor, Ivan Allen, was the sole southern mayor to support the Civil Rights act. President Kennedy praised the city's peaceful desegregation of its schools. "The City Too Busy to Hate" is a hyped-up chamber of commerce moniker but it contains an element of truth. Back in the '60s, elites led by Robert Woodruff, the head of Coca-Cola, helped the white establishment get behind--or at least...