Walls
A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
For thousands of years, humans have built walls and assaulted them, admired walls and reviled them. Great Walls have appeared on nearly every continent, the handiwork of people from Persia, Rome, China, Central America, and beyond. They have accompanied the rise of cities, nations, and empires. And yet they rarely appear in our history books.
Spanning centuries and millennia, drawing on archaeological digs to evidence from Berlin and Hollywood, David Frye uncovers the story of walls and asks questions that are both intriguing and profound. Did walls make civilization possible? Can we live without them?
This is more than a tale of bricks and stone: Frye reveals the startling link between what we build and how we live, who we are and how we came to be. It is nothing less than the story of civilization.
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.
