Walls
A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“A lively popular history of an oft-overlooked element in the development of human society” (Library Journal)—walls—and a haunting and eye-opening saga that reveals a startling link between what we build and how we live.
With esteemed historian David Frye as our raconteur-guide in Walls, which Publishers Weekly praises as “informative, relevant, and thought-provoking,” we journey back to a time before barriers of brick and stone even existed—to an era in which nomadic tribes vied for scarce resources, and each man was bred to a life of struggle. Ultimately, those same men would create edifices of mud, brick, and stone, and with them effectively divide humanity: on one side were those the walls protected; on the other, those the walls kept out.
The stars of this narrative are the walls themselves—rising up in places as ancient and exotic as Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, China, Rome, Mongolia, Afghanistan, the lower Mississippi, and even Central America. As we journey across time and place, we discover a hidden, thousand-mile-long wall in Asia's steppes; learn of bizarre Spartan rituals; watch Mongol chieftains lead their miles-long hordes; witness the epic siege of Constantinople; chill at the fate of French explorers; marvel at the folly of the Maginot Line; tense at the gathering crisis in Cold War Berlin; gape at Hollywood’s gated royalty; and contemplate the wall mania of our own era.
Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as “provocative, well-written, and—with walls rising everywhere on the planet—timely,” Walls gradually reveals the startling ways that barriers have affected our psyches. The questions this book summons are both intriguing and profound: Did walls make civilization possible? And can we live without them? Find out in this masterpiece of historical recovery and preeminent storytelling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Frye, a teacher of ancient and medieval history, offers an accessible history of walls and wall builders. Starting at the 4,000-year-old Great Wall of Shulgi, in Sumer, Frye writing in a breezy and often humorous style (he calls Hadrian "the old drama queen") skips across history to ancient Greek walls, Hadrian's Wall in England, the border walls of China, France's Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall, and the proliferating walls in 21st-century Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Early societies, Frye writes, built walls as a security measure against the barbarism of raiding tribes from the Eurasian steppe (here described in needlessly graphic detail). He notes that the walls constructed by the Chinese Empire paradoxically fostered early globalization by imparting to travelers and merchants the safety that made the Silk Road possible, but also encouraged isolation that left an opening for Western empires to conquer the rest of the world. And he considers the psychological impact of 21st-century walls on both migrants and refugees and the wall-builders trying to turn them away. Readers will find Frye's rumination on the reasons walls exist and will continue to exist, what they can and cannot do, and their contribution to the growth of civilization informative, relevant, and thought-provoking.
