City Lights Bookstore

North Georgia resident Joseph Gatins will be at City Lights on Friday, November 20th at 7:00 p.m. to introduce readers to his family memoir, entitled We Were Dancing on a Volcano: Bloodlines and Fault Lines of a Star-Crossed Atlanta Family, 1849-1989. The book is a well-told family saga centered both in Atlanta and in Paris. Through this remarkable family tree, readers get a tour through late 19th and early-to-mid 20th century history, both in the rising New South city of Atlanta and the French capital, ravaged by both World Wars.

Specifically, the book follows the adventures of more than five generations of families that made their mark on both Atlanta and Paris. The narrative especially highlights one grandmother's brave work with the French Resistance in World War II and her untiring efforts to successfully help her only son escape from Nazi prisoner of war camps. 

Says John C. Inscoe, Editor, The New Georgia Encyclopedia. “Joseph Gatins boasts a remarkable family tree, and chronicles their dramatic ups and downs with great verve and insight in this very aptly titled book. It’s a narrative full of memorable characters – from the Irish brothers who first came to Atlanta in 1849, to a great-grandfather whose gambling operations in New York City provided the wealth with which he built and operated the Georgian Terrace Hotel, to his one-armed grandfather and the French heiress who married him, to his father’s harrowing experience in and ultimate escape from German POW camps during the Second World War, and his romance in the midst of it all with Gatins’ mother, daughter of Colombian ex-patriates in Paris. Through their lives and those of other ancestors, equally colorful, Gatins makes this as much a rich social history of Atlanta – and early twentieth century Paris – as it is a compelling family saga.”