[PDF] Lives In Ruins eBook

Author : Marilyn Johnson
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 32,45 MB
Release : 2014-11-11
Category : Reference
ISBN : 0062127225

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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.

Author : Argyro Loukaki
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 411 pages
File Size : 13,15 MB
Release : 2016-12-05
Category : Science
ISBN : 1351921738

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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 examines how classical Greek monuments are simultaneously perceived as sublime national symbols and as a mythological and archetypal reference against which Western modernism is measured. The book investigates the dialogue this double identity leads to, as well as frequent clashes between ancient (but also later) monuments and their modern urban or regional environment. Living Ruins, Value Conflicts examines the complex historical process of monument restoration and enhancement, and analyses the nexus of changing perceptions, aesthetic visions and formal principles over the past two centuries. The book shows the ways in which archaeology and monumentality affect modern life, the modern aesthetic, our notions of nationhood, of place, of self - and the limits to and possibilities for national development imposed by the need to ensure ruins are kept 'alive'.

Author : Adam Ford
Publisher : HarperCollins Australia
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 11,9 MB
Release : 2015-07-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1460702468

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Part memoir, part potted history of civilisation, My Life in Ruins is the account of a life lived in uncovering the past. Adam Ford is an archaeologist. Not only has he been on expeditions to unlock the mysteries of the past in the Caribbean, British Isles, Jordan, Syria, Israel, United Arab Emirates and Australia, he's also had heat stroke, hypothermia, and dysentery; been chased by camel spiders; walked on by scorpions and pestered by bugs big enough to ride. In more than 20 years roaming the globe, he's lived in some of the most remote locations in the world and suffered the back-breaking and soul-destroying monotony of shifting tonnes of dirt with a shovel. From Cold War bunkers in England to Bronze Age cities on the Euphrates, remotes caves in the Jordan Valley, shipwrecks in Western Australia and burials in Barbados, Adam has dug, dived, abseiled and trekked his way into history. Part memoir, part potted history of civilisation, MY LIFE IN RUINS is the story of a life lived in uncovering the past.

Author : Artemis Leontis
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 33,77 MB
Release : 2020-11-17
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0691210764

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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."

Author : Achy Obejas
Publisher : Akashic Books
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 23,68 MB
Release : 2009-03-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1933354690

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In 1994 Cuba, Usnavy begins to question his loyalty to the Cuban government as his family falls apart amidst rising poverty and he learns a family secret behind his one prize: a Tiffany lamp given to him by his mother.

Author : Kate Atkinson
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 503 pages
File Size : 35,22 MB
Release : 2015-05-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 031634155X

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This stunning companion to Kate Atkinson's #1 bestseller Life After Life, "one of the best novels I've read this century" (Gillian Flynn), follows Ursula's brother Teddy as he navigates an unknown future after a perilous war. "He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future." Kate Atkinson's dazzling Life After Life explored the possibility of infinite chances and the power of choices, following Ursula Todd as she lived through the turbulent events of the last century over and over again. A God in Ruins tells the dramatic story of the 20th Century through Ursula's beloved younger brother Teddy -- would-be poet, heroic pilot, husband, father, and grandfather -- as he navigates the perils and progress of a rapidly changing world. After all that Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge is living in a future he never expected to have. An ingenious and moving exploration of one ordinary man's path through extraordinary times, A God in Ruins proves once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the finest novelists of our age.

Author : Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 34,49 MB
Release : 2021-06-08
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0691220557

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"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.

Author : Edward Hollis
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 12,67 MB
Release : 2009-11-10
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1429982101

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A strikingly original, beautifully narrated history of Western architecture and the cultural transformations that it represents Concrete, marble, steel, brick: little else made by human hands seems as stable, as immutable, as a building. Yet the life of any structure is neither fixed nor timeless. Outliving their original contexts and purposes, buildings are forced to adapt to each succeeding age. To survive, they must become shape-shifters. In an inspired refashioning of architectural history, Edward Hollis recounts more than a dozen stories of such metamorphosis, highlighting the way in which even the most familiar structures all change over time into "something rich and strange." The Parthenon, that epitome of a ruined temple, was for centuries a working church and then a mosque; the cathedral of Notre Dame was "restored" to a design that none of its original makers would have recognized. Remains of the Berlin Wall, meanwhile, which was once gleefully smashed and bulldozed, are now treated as precious relics. With The Secret Lives of Buildings, Edward Hollis recounts the most enthralling of these metamorphoses and shows how buildings have come to embody the history of Western culture.

Author : Jess Walter
Publisher : Center Point
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,9 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Actors and actresses
ISBN : 9781611735369

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In 1962, on a rocky patch of sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper looks out over the incandescent waters of the sea and spies a woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. He learns that she is an American starlet who is said to be dying. And the story begins again in the present when half a world away, an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio’s back lot searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives including the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion. Gloriously inventive and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.