Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings

by James Crawford Narrated by John Lee

Overview

AN INVITING, FASCINATING COMPENDIUM OF TWENTY-ONE OF HISTORY'S MOST FAMOUS LOST PLACES,*FROM THE TOWER OF BABEL TO THE TWIN TOWERS

Buildings are more like us than we realize. They can be born into wealth or poverty, enjoying every privilege or struggling to make ends meet. They have parents-gods, kings and emperors, governments, visionaries and madmen-as well as friends and enemies. They have duties and responsibilities. They can endure crises of faith and purpose. They can succeed or fail. They can live. And, sooner or later, they die.

In*Fallen Glory, James Crawford uncovers the biographies of some of the world's most fascinating lost and ruined buildings, from the dawn of civilization to the cyber era. The lives of these iconic structures are packed with drama and intrigue. Soap operas on the grandest scale, they feature war and religion, politics and art, love and betrayal, catastrophe and hope. Frequently their afterlives have been no less dramatic-their memories used and abused down the millennia for purposes both sacred and profane. They provide the stage for a startling array of characters, including Gilgamesh, the Cretan Minotaur, Agamemnon, Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Adolf Hitler, and even Bruce Springsteen.

The twenty-one structures Crawford focuses on include The Tower of Babel, The Temple of Jerusalem, The Library of Alexandria, The Bastille, Kowloon Walled City, the Berlin Wall, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Ranging from the deserts of Iraq, the banks of the Nile and the cloud forests of Peru, to the great cities of Jerusalem, Istanbul, Paris, Rome, London and New York,*Fallen Glory*is a unique guide to a world of vanished architecture.

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2017 - AudioFile

Crawford’s history of famous structures—their rise, fall, and remains, real or remembered—gets a skilled but somewhat ill-fitting reading from the talented John Lee. Lee’s voice is deep and substantial, clipped almost to excess, but engaging and likable. His pacing is excellent, and he manages commendably the pronunciation of a range of names and references across history and geography. But he often falls into a rhythmic pattern, as if declaiming verse rather than reading nonfiction, a style that can be distracting and doesn’t represent the substance and the manner of the book. Still, he’s too intelligent a narrator to fail to convey the proper sense and weight of the text through his tone and emphasis, so the audiobook remains both listenable and clear. W.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

10/17/2016
This well-researched and evocative work turns history into biography with the fascinating tales of the lives and deaths of 20 structures from around the world. Crawford, who manages communications and publications for Scotland’s National Collection of architecture and archaeology, reveals a witty and intelligent literary voice as he attempts to “rebuild these fallen glories in mind’s eye and let them live again.” The 20 chapters cover the creation and desecration of a wide range of subjects, from the Tower of Babel to GeoCities. Most were destroyed by human hubris, with later attempts at resurrecting the sites often leading to further chaos and destruction. Though some of the early chapters seem more biographies of self-aggrandizing romantics such as Arthur Evans and Heinrich Schliemann, later chapters on the World Trade Center’s collapsed Twin Towers and the Islamic State’s obliteration of the ancient city of Palmyra reveal dramatic, startling connections between past and present, creator and destroyer, politics and culture. The book is sprinkled with illustrations and photographs, and it concludes with a welcome section offering suggestions for further in-depth reading. Although the book overly is descriptive at times, it’s archaeologist approach concludes with a compelling view of the future. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

No one can accuse Fallen Glory of lacking ambition....It’s a narrative that spans seven millennia, five continents and even reaches into cyberspace. At over 600 pages with endnotes, it’s a commitment. I savored each page.”—Henry Petroski, The Wall Street Journal

“Witty and memorable...moving as well as myth-busting.”—Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“[An] elegant, charged book... A well-written prize for students of history, archaeology, and urban planning.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Crawford’s astute, entertaining, and affecting gallery of ruins will appeal to readers drawn to the intersection of history and architecture.”—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

“The most interesting book I have come across this year. This is a magnificent study of buildings and other structures that have disappeared. Crawford writes beautifully and tells a fascinating tale that embraces the Library of Alexandria, the Berlin Wall and, in the virtual world, the now defunct Geocities. A lovely, wise book.”—Alexander McCall Smith, New Statesman (UK)

“This well-researched and evocative work turns history into biography with the fascinating tales of the lives and deaths of [21] structures from around the world. Crawford...reveals a witty and intelligent literary voice....Later chapters on the World Trade Center’s collapsed Twin Towers and the Islamic State’s obliteration of the ancient city of Palmyra reveal dramatic, startling connections between past and present, creator and destroyer, politics and culture.”—Publishers Weekly

“Civilisations and their buildings, writes Crawford, inevitably succumb to the ‘eternal cycle of rise, decline and fall.’ He conveys superbly these absorbing tales of hubris, power, violence and decay.”—The Sunday Times (UK)

“Magnificent...Many of these buildings can be seen as microcosms of the decline and fall of whole civilisations.”—The Daily Telegraph (five-star UK review)

“Crawford has a striking ability to summon the reality of these long-vanished places, trotting nimbly through eras of history and archaeology to trace the extent to which they protrude into fact...[he] writes exquisitely, combining economy and clarity with beautiful flights of phrase, and his scholarship is meticulous. Fallen Glory is a marvelous book. A second helping would be more than welcome.”—The Literary Review (UK)

“Crawford tells the intricate biography of each of his buildings with the unspoken assumption that in some way a building (like the city in which it exists) is alive...The result is a cabinet of curiosities, a book of wonders with unexpected excursions and jubilant and haunting marginalia...Ideas spin off ideas and facts off facts like a marvelous clattering snooker-table.”—The Spectator (UK)

Library Journal

11/01/2016
Crawford's (Aerofilms: A History of Britain from Above) latest title is not the first to offer building necrologies: The AIA Guide to New York City has a chapter devoted to demolished structures. Books with the word "lost" in their titles often document the destroyed architectural heritage of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Yet with over 2,000 endnotes covering seven millennia, this may be the first to weave an epic tale of how buildings are devastated by war, because of failed social experiments, or as a result of natural disaster. Five parts, each with a regrettably contrived title ("You Say Utopia, I Say Dystopia"), contain 20 chapters tracing iconic architecture, from the Tower of Babel to the World Trade Center, with an epilog about recent ruins in Palmyra, Syria. Crawford shows particular sensitivity to highly charged subjects, such as Israel's control of the Temple Mount since 1967 and the razing of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis. VERDICT For a book about buildings, the paucity of illustrations is unfortunate. This will appeal more to social than architectural historians.—Paul Glassman, Yeshiva Univ. Libs., New York

JUNE 2017 - AudioFile

Crawford’s history of famous structures—their rise, fall, and remains, real or remembered—gets a skilled but somewhat ill-fitting reading from the talented John Lee. Lee’s voice is deep and substantial, clipped almost to excess, but engaging and likable. His pacing is excellent, and he manages commendably the pronunciation of a range of names and references across history and geography. But he often falls into a rhythmic pattern, as if declaiming verse rather than reading nonfiction, a style that can be distracting and doesn’t represent the substance and the manner of the book. Still, he’s too intelligent a narrator to fail to convey the proper sense and weight of the text through his tone and emphasis, so the audiobook remains both listenable and clear. W.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2017-01-10
A searching survey of some of humankind's greatest architectural accomplishments.Whereas a human life is usually less than 100 years, writes Scottish preservationist Crawford, "in its lifetime, the same building can meet Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler." Buildings have come to stand for whole civilizations, have indeed been practically all that survives of a civilization, whether the now-fallen city of Palmyra or the ruins of Angkor Wat. In an arresting vision, Crawford juxtaposes the ancient Tower of Babel and the recently fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center, imagining that the American soldiers who invaded Iraq in 2003 "would have been able to see, had they known what they were looking for, the place where it all began." The author's "it all" includes some grandly noble experiments, such as St. Paul's Cathedral in London, one that both royalists and republicans knew even in a time of civil war "still mattered," so much so that huge energies and treasuries went into rebuilding it after the Great Fire of 1666. Along the route of his detailed but lightly told tour, Crawford stops in at places such as Karakorum, the ancient Central Asian city that afforded the Mongol Empire a stronghold from which to conduct an unusually enlightened kind of administration, encouraging free trade and suppressing the usual bandits and robbers of the caravan routes; the long-gone walled city of Kowloon, victim of a perhaps not so enlightened modern colonizer; and even the imagined metropolises of the here-today, gone-tomorrow virtual world of GeoCities. Some of the most affecting passages, though, concern the World Trade Center and its wealth of intertwined stories, from its designer's acrophobia (hence its narrow, containing windows) to the destruction of old lower Manhattan that preceded the building of those towers. Crawford closes this elegant, charged book with a view of cities now destroyed in the wars of the Middle East, ones that, hopefully, will one day rise from the ashes.A well-written prize for students of history, archaeology, and urban planning.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171992880
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/07/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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