Mike Lassiter Shares Our Vanishing Americana: A North Carolina Portrait
On UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, October 26, at 9:30 PM

Mike Lassiter's Our Vanishing Americana: A North Carolina Portrait provides a pictorial guide to North Carolina's commercial relics of the 19th and 20th century: the general stores and hardware shops, the corner drug stores with soda fountains, the blue-plate diners and hot dog stands, the filling stations, the barber shops, the single-screen theaters.

In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Friday, October 26, at 9:30 PM, the Statesville lawyer and Davidson resident shares the many images he captured on his travels along North Carolina's rural highways and byways, exploring an era before Internet shopping, big-box stores, shopping malls, chain restaurants and strip malls.

Mike Lassiter is originally from Statesville, NC, and practices law with his father there. He now lives in Davidson with his three children. His 244-page book, Our Vanishing Americana: A North Carolina Portrait, includes hundreds of photographs from all 100 North Carolina counties of buildings, and a way of life, which is vanishing from our landscape as "progress" moves across the state.

Don’t miss DG Martin’s all-new interview with Mike Lassiter on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, October 26, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airing Sunday, October 28, at 5 PM.

During the 20-week, 10th anniversary season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests also include: J. Peder Zane (The Top Ten), Gov. Michael Easley (Look Out, College, Here I Come!), Michele Bowen (Holy Ghost Corner), Neal Thompson (Driving With the Devil), Joseph Bathanti (Coventry), Joanna Catherine Scott (The Road From Chapel Hill), James Dodson (Beautiful Madness), Dan Heath (Made To Stick), Margaret Maron (Hard Row), James Peacock (Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World), Tim Madigan (I’m Proud of You), Melton McLaurin (The Marines of Montford Point), Kathryn Stripling Byer (Coming to Rest),  David Guy (Jake Fades), Georgann Eubanks (Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains), Zelda Lockhart (Cold Running Creek), Joe and Terry Graedon (Best Choices from the People’s Pharmacy), Fred Hobson (Off the Rim), and William Powell (Encyclopedia of North Carolina).

For additional information about series guests and airdates, plus links to the Bookwatch blog and online book club, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other original productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.

—UNC-TV—