Download or read book Lives in Ruins written by Marilyn Johnson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Dead Beat and This Book is Overdue! turns her piercing eye and charming wit to the real-life avatars of Indiana Jones—the archaeologists who sort through the muck and mire of swamps, ancient landfills, volcanic islands, and other dirty places to reclaim history for us all. Pompeii, Machu Picchu, the Valley of the Kings, the Parthenon—the names of these legendary archaeological sites conjure up romance and mystery. The news is full of archaeology: treasures found (British king under parking lot) and treasures lost (looters, bulldozers, natural disaster, and war). Archaeological research tantalizes us with possibilities (are modern humans really part Neandertal?). Where are the archaeologists behind these stories? What kind of work do they actually do, and why does it matter? Marilyn Johnson’s Lives in Ruins is an absorbing and entertaining look at the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu, and excavates their lives. Her subjects share stories we rarely read in history books, about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, children of the first century, Chinese woman warriors, sunken fleets, mummies. What drives these archaeologists is not the money (meager) or the jobs (scarce) or the working conditions (dangerous), but their passion for the stories that would otherwise be buried and lost.
Download or read book How to Live in Ruins written by Lee Chilcote and published by . This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in How to Live in Ruins tell one couple's story of moving to Cleveland and raising a family there. This is a book for anyone who has ever loved a place that's a little bit rusty and tried to make it better.
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 Living Ruins written by Philippe Erikson and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2022-10-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruins and remnants of the past are endowed with life, rather than mere relics handed down from previous generations. Living Ruins explores some of the ways Indigenous people relate to the material remains of human activity and provides an informed and critical stance that nuances and contests institutionalized patrimonialization discourse on vestiges of the past in present landscapes. Ten case studies from the Maya region, Amazonia, and the Andes detail and contextualize narratives, rituals, and a range of practices and attitudes toward different kinds of vestiges. The chapters engage with recently debated issues such as regimes of historicity and knowledge, cultural landscapes, conceptions of personhood and ancestrality, artifacts, and materiality. They focus on Indigenous perspectives rather than mainstream narratives such as those mediated by UNESCO, Hollywood, travel agents, and sometimes even academics. The contributions provide critical analyses alongside a multifaceted account of how people relate to the place/time nexus, expanding our understanding of different ontological conceptualizations of the past and their significance in the present. Living Ruins adds to the lively body of work on the invention of tradition, Indigenous claims on their lands and history, “retrospective ethnogenesis,” and neo-Indianism in a world where tourism, NGOs, and Western essentialism are changing Indigenous attitudes and representations. This book is significant to anyone interested in cultural heritage studies, Amerindian spirituality, and Indigenous engagement with archaeological sites in Latin America. Contributors: Cedric Becquey, Laurence Charlier Zeineddine, Marie Chosson, Pablo Cruz, Philippe Erikson, Antoinette Molinié, Fernando Santos-Granero, Emilie Stoll, Valentina Vapnarsky, Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
Download or read book New Deal Ruins written by Edward G. Goetz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public housing was an integral part of the New Deal, as the federal government funded public works to generate economic activity and offer material support to families made destitute by the Great Depression, and it remained a major element of urban policy in subsequent decades. As chronicled in New Deal Ruins, however, housing policy since the 1990s has turned to the demolition of public housing in favor of subsidized units in mixed-income communities and the use of tenant-based vouchers rather than direct housing subsidies. While these policies, articulated in the HOPE VI program begun in 1992, aimed to improve the social and economic conditions of urban residents, the results have been quite different. As Edward G. Goetz shows, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and there has been a loss of more than 250,000 permanently affordable residential units. Goetz offers a critical analysis of the nationwide effort to dismantle public housing by focusing on the impact of policy changes in three cities: Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans.Goetz shows how this transformation is related to pressures of gentrification and the enduring influence of race in American cities. African Americans have been disproportionately affected by this policy shift; it is the cities in which public housing is most closely identified with minorities that have been the most aggressive in removing units. Goetz convincingly refutes myths about the supposed failure of public housing. He offers an evidence-based argument for renewed investment in public housing to accompany housing choice initiatives as a model for innovative and equitable housing policy.
Download or read book Eva Palmer Sikelianos written by Artemis Leontis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first biography to tell the fascinating story of Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874-1952), an American actor, director, composer, and weaver best known for reviving the Delphic Festivals. Yet, as Artemis Leontis reveals, Palmer's most spectacular performance was her daily revival of ancient Greek life. For almost half a century, dressed in handmade Greek tunics and sandals, she sought to make modern life freer and more beautiful through a creative engagement with the ancients. Along the way, she crossed paths with other seminal modern artists such as Natalie Clifford Barney, Renée Vivien, Isadora Duncan, Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, Richard Strauss, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Nikos Kazantzakis, George Seferis, Henry Miller, Paul Robeson, and Ted Shawn. 0Brilliant and gorgeous, with floor-length auburn hair, Palmer was a wealthy New York debutante who studied Greek at Bryn Mawr College before turning her back on conventional society to live a lesbian life in Paris. She later followed Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora) and his wife to Greece and married the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos in 1907. With single-minded purpose, Palmer re-created ancient art forms, staging Greek tragedy with her own choreography, costumes, and even music. Having exhausted her inheritance, she returned to the United States in 1933, was blacklisted for criticizing American imperialism during the Cold War, and was barred from returning to Greece until just before her death. 0Drawing on hundreds of newly discovered letters and featuring many previously unpublished photographs, this biography vividly re-creates the unforgettable story of a remarkable nonconformist whom one contemporary described as "the only ancient Greek I ever knew."
Download or read book Living Ruins Value Conflicts written by Argyro Loukaki and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using monuments and ruins by way of illustration, this fascinating book examines the symbolic, ideological, geographical and aesthetic importance of Greek classical iconography for the Western world. It shows the ways in which archaeology and monumentality affect modern life, our notions of nationhood, of place, of self - and the limits and possibilities imposed by the need to ensure ruins are kept 'alive'.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Ruins written by Robert Ginsberg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constructs a theory of ruins that celebrates their vitality and unity in aesthetic experience. Its argument draws upon over 100 illustrations prepared in 40 countries. Ruins flourish as matter, form, function, incongruity, site, and symbol. Ruin underlies cultural values in cinema, literature and philosophy. Finally, ruin guides meditations upon our mortality and endangered world.
Download or read book Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins written by Guilherme Carréra and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2023 Award for Best First Monograph WINNER of the Association of Moving Image Researchers (AIM) 2022 Best Monograph prize Guilherme Carréra's compelling book examines imagery of ruins in contemporary Brazilian cinema and considers these representations in the context of Brazilian society. Carréra analyses three groups of unconventional documentaries focused on distinct geographies: Brasília - The Age of Stone (2013) and White Out, Black In (2014); Rio de Janeiro - ExPerimetral (2016), The Harbour (2013), Tropical Curse (2016) and HU Enigma (2011); and indigenous territories - Corumbiara: They Shoot Indians, Don't They? (2009), Tava, The House of Stone (2012), Two Villages, One Path (2008) and Guarani Exile (2011). In portraying ruinscapes in different ways, these powerful films articulate critiques of the notions of progress and (under) development in the Brazilian nation. Carréra invites the reader to walk amid the debris and reflect upon the strategies of spatial representation employed by the filmmakers. He addresses this body of films in relation to the legacies of Cinema Novo, Tropicália and Cinema Marginal, asking how these presentday films dialogue with or depart from previous traditions. Through this dialogue, he argues, the selected films challenge not only documentary-making conventions but also the country's official narrative.
Download or read book American Ruins written by Camilo J. Vergara and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara has spent years documenting the decline of the built environment in New York City; Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Chicago; Gary, Indiana; Detroit; and Los Angeles.
Download or read book The Ruins of California written by Martha Sherrill and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-01-02 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the Ruin family in 1970s California, as described by the precocious young Inez, life is complex. Her father, Paul, is self-obsessed, intrusive, and brilliant. He's also twice divorced, leaving Inez to bounce between two worlds and embracing neither-that of Paul's bohemian life in San Francisco and the more sedate world of her mother Connie, a Latin bombshell who plays tennis and attends EST seminars in the suburbs. As Inez progresses through high school we are witness to a remarkable family saga that renders a strange and fascinating slice of America in transition-one like the Ruins of California themselves, at once bold and innocent, creative and chaotic, obsessed and liberating.
Download or read book Performing Ruins written by Simon Murray and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author’s fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book’s main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author’s own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists’ reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.
Download or read book A Shout in the Ruins written by Kevin Powers and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond, this novel by the award-winning author of The Yellow Birds explores the brutal legacy of violence and exploitation in American society. Spanning over one hundred years, from the antebellum era to the 1980's, A Shout in the Ruins examines the fates of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation outside of Richmond, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that dominion in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. And two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see. Seamlessly interwoven is the story of George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looking back from the 1950s on the void where his childhood ought to have been. Watching the government destroy his neighborhood to build a stretch of interstate highway through Richmond, he travels south in an attempt to recover his true origins. With the help of a young woman named Lottie, he goes in search of the place he once called home, all the while reckoning with the more than 90 years he lived as witness to so much that changed during the 20th century, and so much that didn't. As we then watch Lottie grapple with life's disappointments and joys in the 1980's, now in her own middle-age, the questions remain: How do we live in a world built on the suffering of others? And can love exist in a place where for 400 years violence has been the strongest form of intimacy? Written with the same emotional intensity, harrowing realism, and poetic precision that made The Yellow Birds one of the most celebrated novels of the past decade, A Shout in the Ruins cements Powers' place in the forefront of American letters and demands that we reckon with the moral weight of our troubling history.
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 427 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 Mushroom at the End of the World written by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Faith Amid the Ruins written by Heath A. Thomas and published by Lexham Press. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Faith Amid the Ruins, Heath Thomas brings the story of Habakkuk to life—reminding us that although it’s a small book about a lesser known prophet, it’s themes and importance are anything but minor. When we face hardship and opposition, it’s easy to seek security and stability instead of God’s will. Habakkuk teaches us both about the faithfulness of God and what it looks like to live faithfully before God when life turns upside down.
Download or read book A Rhetoric of Ruins written by Andrew F. Wood and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Rhetoric of Ruins contributes to an interdisciplinary conversation about the role of wrecked and abandoned places in modern life. Topics in this book stretch from retro- and post-human futures to a Jeremiadic analysis of the role of ruins in American presidential discourse. From that foundation, A Rhetoric of Ruins employs hauntology to visit a California ghost-town, psychogeography to confront Detroit ruins, heterochrony to survey Pennsylvania’s once (and future) Graffiti Highway, an expanded articulation of heterotopia to explore the pleasurable contamination of Chernobyl, and an evening in Turkmenistan’s Doorway to Hell that stretches across time from Homer’s Iliad to Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Written to engage scholars and students of communication studies, cultural geography, anthropology, landscape studies, performance studies, public memory, urban studies, and tourism studies, A Rhetoric of Ruins is a conceptually rich and vividly written account of how broken and derelict places help us manage our fears in the modern era.
