A Journey Through Ruins

Download or read book A Journey Through Ruins written by Patrick Wright and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique evocation of Britain at the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule, A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the country through the unexpected prism of every day life in East London. Written at a time when the looming but still unfinished tower of Canary Wharf was still wrapped in protective blue plastic, its cast of characters includes council tenants trapped in disintegrating tower blocks, depressed gentrifiers worrying about negative equity, metal detectorists, sharp-eyed estate agents and management consultants, and even Prince Charles. Cutting through the teeming surface of London, it investigates a number of wider themes: the rise and dramatic fall of council housing, the coming of privatization, the changing memory of the Second World War, once used to justify post-war urban development and reform but now seen as a sacrifice betrayed. Written half a century after the blitz, the book reviews the rise and fall of the London of the post-war settlement. It remains one of the very best accounts of what it was like to live through the Thatcher years.

Download or read book In Ruins written by Christopher Woodward and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-05-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this enchanting meditation on ruins, Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba, and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. With an exquisite sense of romantic melancholy, we encounter the teenage Byron in the moldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching the buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the Colosseum, and Freud at Pompeii. We travel the Appian Way with Dickens and behold the Baths of Caracalla with Shelley. An exhilarating tour, at once elegant and stimulating, In Ruins casts an exalting spell as it explores the bewitching power of architectural remains and their persistent hold on the imagination.

Download or read book Ruins written by Jane Eastoe and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of Britain's most wild and wonderfully atmospheric places: its ruins, including castles, follies, abbeys, and country houses. From romantic ruined castles to mysterious stone circles, from frivolous follies to crumbling towers by the sea, there is something about ruins that excites our imagination--and the National Trust has many of the best examples in Britain. Featuring more than 50 captivating sites, this is a superbly illustrated celebration of these wild and wonderfully atmospheric places across the country, dating from Roman times to the 20th century. From Cornwall to Scotland, the book is organized by region and includes overview maps, so you can plot your own journey around Britain's remarkable ruins.

Download or read book Ruins written by Peter Kuper and published by SelfMadeHero. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album Selected as an ALA Top Ten Graphic Novel of 2016 Samantha and George are a couple heading towards a sabbatical year in the quaint Mexican town of Oaxaca. For Samantha, it is the opportunity to revisit her past. For George, it is an unsettling step into the unknown. For both of them, it will be a collision course with political and personal events that will alter their paths and the town of Oaxaca forever. In tandem, the remarkable and arduous journey that a Monarch butterfly endures on its annual migration from Canada to Mexico is woven into Ruins. This creates a parallel picture of the challenges of survival in our ever-changing world. Ruins explores the shadows and light of Mexico through its past and present as encountered by an array of characters. The real and surreal intermingle to paint an unforgettable portrait of life south of the Rio Grande.

Download or read book The Ruins written by Scott Smith and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2006-07-18 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Trapped in the Mexican jungle, a group of friends stumble upon a creeping horror unlike anything they could ever imagine in "the best horror novel of the new century" (Stephen King). Also a major motion picture! Two young couples are on a lazy Mexican vacation—sun-drenched days, drunken nights, making friends with fellow tourists. When the brother of one of those friends disappears, they decide to venture into the jungle to look for him. What started out as a fun day-trip slowly spirals into a nightmare when they find an ancient ruins site ... and the terrifying presence that lurks there. "The Ruins does for Mexican vacations what Jaws did for New England beaches.” —Entertainment Weekly “Smith’s nail-biting tension is a pleasure all its own.... This stuff isn’t for the faint of heart.” —New York Post “A story so scary you may never want to go on vacation, or dig around in your garden, again.” —USA Today

Download or read book The Ruins Lesson written by Susan Stewart and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-06-02 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 'The Ruins Lesson,' the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet-critic Susan Stewart explores the West's fascination with ruins in literature, visual art, and architecture, covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins, artists, and writers she surveys, Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination, particularly Roman ruins, in the work and thought of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping, deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory, eighteenth-century melancholy, and nineteenth-century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster"--

Download or read book A Journey Through Ruins written by Patrick Wright and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-02-26 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique evocation of Britain at the height of Margaret Thatcher's rule, A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the country through the unexpected prism of every day life in East London. Written at a time when the looming but still unfinished tower of Canary Wharf was still wrapped in protective blue plastic, its cast of characters includes council tenants trapped in disintegrating tower blocks, depressed gentrifiers worrying about negative equity, metal detectorists, sharp-eyed estate agents and management consultants, and even Prince Charles. Cutting through the teeming surface of London, it investigates a number of wider themes: the rise and dramatic fall of council housing, the coming of privatization, the changing memory of the Second World War, once used to justify post-war urban development and reform but now seen as a sacrifice betrayed. Written half a century after the blitz, the book reviews the rise and fall of the London of the post-war settlement. It remains one of the very best accounts of what it was like to live through the Thatcher years.