It isn't the fact that Yardley, a Washington Post book reviewer, dwells overly-much and overly-righteously on his liberal view of race relations that causes this book to stumble as a travelogue. It isn't even the all-too-many pages spent on lovingly detailing his university days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the 1950s. Rather, it's the author's seeming inability to get out of the way and instead focus his subject matter -- the US Mid-Atlantic, which until recently was considered unworthy of much ink apart from the usual overworked highlights of Washington and Philadelphia. Yardley does manage more than a few moments of real interest where he obviously loses himself in the moment, such as a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, the stunningly designed home outside Bear Run, Pennsylvania; or a tour of the Utz Potato Chip factory in Hanover, Pennsylvania. And there is no question he is a good writer. But a memorable travelogue, like any good reporting, consists of more than geographic routes-in-detail and memory flashbacks. It includes finding and coaxing people with unusual stories out of the silence in which they hide. And it is this that Yardley, a veteran of some of the East Coast's best newsprint, fails to do either from lack of time, or more probably from lack of interest. Anyone reading this book might conclude the author is writing to entertain his upper-middle-class colleagues at the Washington Post and their ilk, in much the way vacation returnees rave about their pricey two-week resort adventures on the Monday morning back at work. On the other hand, the wider readership -- those with a hankering to actually discover something new and fascinating about the Mid-Atlantic -- will find little in the way of inspiration. You'd be better served and get more bang for your buck by reading Lonely Planet; which mercifully avoids the pretentious, self-serving homilies of Yuppie sensibility found in "States of Mind."