Charlotte: Searching for Soul in a Booming Southern City

CHARLOTTE is a tale of one city, a meditation and inquiry into the inner life of one Southern metro of 2.6 million. It is also a story of life in cities across America. It is about a profound and prevalent experience of daily life, yet so seldom acknowledged or allowed expression, it has no name. This book calls it Soul, referring to Sense of Place, Home, the universal and innate need of people to form attachment to and shape where they live.
When Soul is undermined, people live as in "exile." Though not physically displaced, a vital connection is broken, the foundational past eroded, a stake in the future foreclosed. It gives rise to public moods of angst, anomie, resentment, perhaps even primed for sedition.
Robert FitzPatrick goes looking for Soul in Charlotte, where he was born and lived most of his life. He investigates how Sense of Place is affected by the city's quest for "world class" status.
Examining its massive expansion and makeover from the 1960s forward, this book searches in Charlotte's obliterated old downtown and the gleaming new uptown that replaced it. It walks through neighborhoods and parks, and reports on heroic efforts of residents to maintain them against commercial re-purposing. It inquires into Charlotte's struggling public schools, now the state's most racially and economically segregated. It explores the values proclaimed in Charlotte's prosperity-preaching churches and reflects upon the historical imprint of acquisitive Calvinism on the city's core character. It tells of a struggling but resilient arts community and looks for civic spirit in Charlotte's professional sports. It each area, this book asks, "Where is Home?"
Charlotte is "a center of the New South" according to the New York Times. Charlotte is also former home to felon Jim Bakker's religious "theme park". As headquarters of Amway's top pyramid recruiters, Charlotte was the pilgrimage destination for millions seeking Amway's paradise of "unlimited opportunity." Charlotte has been ranked among best cities to live in and worst city in America for low income families to escape poverty. Known as "banktown," modern Charlotte has absorbed and now reflects banking's culture and values, which are rarely examined and almost never challenged. FitzPatrick's inquiry disrupts Charlotte's prevailing narrative and current mandates: growth, wealth, and status at any cost.
Robert FitzPatrick is internationally known for activism and investigative books, FALSE PROFITS and PONZINOMICS, on values and beliefs that fuel pyramid and ponzi frauds. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. He has been featured on CBS 60 Minutes and in documentaries on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and on the John Oliver Show on HBO.
In CHARLOTTE, he now directs his insights at values and beliefs that replace a city's heart with high rises, history with hype, civic needs with commercial narrative, and life with lifestyle.
This story is about Charlotte but readers will recognize their own cities, their own lives.