Provocative, well-written, and-with walls rising everywhere on the planet-timely.” “A sturdy historical tour of walls and their builders-and their discontents as well. "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." Walls could add a level of context to the current heated discussion of walls in the U.S.” “Insights abound in every chapter…The book is helpfully peppered with maps and a timeline for historical orientation and packs an impressive amount of scholarship and storytelling into its relatively compact perimeter. "These are good stories and Frye tells them well.a timely and interesting book." is enviably good at turning historical and archaeological evidence into vivid prose, and his writing is as clear as on any wall." 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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. “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.
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