In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.83 (756 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1400030862 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-08-14 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
O.K. but do not expect to be wowed. tom shumate Not a great book. Did not hold my intrest as I thought it would. Worth reading just for the historical information, but the story was not as interesting as it could be.. Grady Harp said A Walk Though Paradise Garden. IN RUINS by Christopher Woodward is one of the most genteel, warmly evocative, yet scholarly extended essays about beauty that has appeared in a while. Only a true artist could 1) come up with the idea of meditating on ruins of past civilizations and "A Walk Though Paradise Garden" according to Grady Harp. IN RUINS by Christopher Woodward is one of the most genteel, warmly evocative, yet scholarly extended essays about beauty that has appeared in a while. Only a true artist could 1) come up with the idea of meditating on ruins of past civilizations and 2) recreate historical places not only through his own perceptive eyes but also through the eyes and writings and drawings and paintings of artists for the past two hundred years. Woodward finds beauty in the "neglected" ruins, the old sites where nature has nudged the surfaces with wild flowers, mosses, crawling vines, and ground swells, preferring this respect for times past to the wild flurry. ) recreate historical places not only through his own perceptive eyes but also through the eyes and writings and drawings and paintings of artists for the past two hundred years. Woodward finds beauty in the "neglected" ruins, the old sites where nature has nudged the surfaces with wild flowers, mosses, crawling vines, and ground swells, preferring this respect for times past to the wild flurry. Before you Travel anywhere, read this book Its' difficult to describe this book, or even what its aboutbut I couldn't put it down for two days (The time it took to read it). I suppose the best way to describe reading it is that is was like sitting down at a nice pub by the fire and listening to a very, very interesting person speak. Woodward has that all too rare combination of being extraordinarily intelligent, thinking and feeling, and able to express it. Have you ever looked at a ruin, and found your imagination running away? Have ever wondered why ruins seem to evoke more thought from people -from poets like Shelly (covered in the book) and artists of the Romantic period? Short o
From Virginia Water in Surrey, the largest artificial ruin in Britain, to Ninfa ("the loveliest lost city in Europe") and the real life inspirations for the abodes of Miss Havisham, the Ushers and Ozymandias, Woodward ventures to Ephesus (where St. Although Byron may have felt "the air of Greece" made him a poet, Woodward is certain that it was "the clammy mists of a ruined English abbey" and the effects are present in his own heightened, engaging prose, which often finds literary ghosts among the stones. . The Roman Coliseum morphs from terrifying entertainment arena to cow pasture and stone quarry to major tourist attraction visited by, among the many, Hawthorne and Hardy. "Ruins do not speak," says Woodward, "we speak for them." In this compact but capacious book, Woodward brings forth the voices of architects, diarists, sculptors, eccentrics, archeologists, even a boxer.
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. An exhilarating tour, at once elegant and stimulating, In Ruinscasts an exalting spell as it explores the bewitching power of architectural remains and their persistent hold on the imagination.. We travel the Appian Way with Dickens and behold the Baths of Caracalla with Shelley