After the Smoke Clears

Mellon's book finds history's visual record . . . in the faces of the people those now-gone industries left behind. In his photographs, they appear often as impassive, and impressive, as the sprawling industrial complexes that once sustained them.

A very personal journey through a land that many people have forgotten—the land of closed mills, broken promises, and shattered dreams. I have been there, too, and in his encounters and his photographs, Mellon reminds us all of the price the new economy exacted before it, in turn, went bust.

If there has ever been an adequate visualization of the phrase 'the salt of the earth,' it can be found in After the Smoke Clears. . . . Mellon's text is as rich as the photos. This rich and vital book captures one of the greatest disappearing acts of all time: the eradication of our industrial way of life.

His stories reverberate poignantly with those told by his interview subjects in the various towns. Mellon rulled the dice by inserting himself into his book, and he won. His photographs, which open the book and set the stage, work beutifully with his text. . . . Mellon's book belongs on a shelf with Richard russo's great novel, 'Empire Falls,' about human aspirations in a decining New England industrial town; Donald Harington's 'Let Us Build Us a City,' a personal search for bygone towns in rural Arkansas; and 'Closing' by Bill Bamberger and Cathy Davidson, about the last days of a century-old furniture factory in North Carolina. All of these tell us where we are at the end of the last century and the beginning of a new one.

. . . a compelling and highly recommended saga of twentieth-century American history enhanced with black-and-white photography.