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)

★ 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.