Customer Reviews

In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Here is the best description of the fascination of ruins that I have ever read. It is full of surprises and wonderful illustrations. There is nothing little about the spirit of this book - Woodward writes beautifully and has a perfect grasp of the sublime aesthetics of fine ruins. The reader is swept through a wide range of time, and of time periods, from antiquity to the present day. All throughout are marvelous, pithy descriptions - a super book !!

The erudite Woodward has written an enormously entertaining and illuminating book whose rich, flowing prose is a pleasure to read. History is blended with the starkness of the modern world and transmitted to the reader redolent with imagery. Woodward's broad, firm grasp of history and effective weaving of desperate elements produces a satisfying read for those intrigued by the forgotten corners of the world and the mystery of the past. "In Ruins" is destined to become a classic. The residue of a romantic, misty past lingers long after the last page is turned.

Harold Bloom writes that what makes some authors great to the point where their work approaches the canonical is "strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange." This meditation on ruins will surely withstand the test of time as well or better than some of the memorials of history that it describes. It has piqued my interest in something that I'd never given much thought to. I have been within walking distance of a couple of places the author writes about, and passed on the opportunity to visit them. Histories comprise more than half of my leisure reading, but somehow I couldn't muster the curiosity to explore a historical ruin in the same way I would with museums & historic landmarks (that are still in one piece). This wonderfully written book has changed that for me. Highly recommended, a book that you will likely want to re-read every few years, and take with you on visits to Rome, Sicily, Wales and more.

Everything you wanted to know about ruins but hadn't thought to ask. The role ruins play in the imaginative life of European culture: a reflection on mortality and the transience of civilizations, among other interpretations. Modeled after "The Haunts of the Black Masseur" it is often fascinating, consistently well-written but on occasion seemed to go on too long. The last chapter was the most moving as the personal histories seemed the most tragic and affecting. An intriguing cultural history, as told by an obsessed historian as a labor of love.

IN RUINS by Christopher Woodward is one of the most genteel, warmly evocative, yet scholarly extended essays about beauty that has appeared in a while. Only a true artist could 1) come up with the idea of meditating on ruins of past civilizations and 2) recreate historical places not only through his own perceptive eyes but also through the eyes and writings and drawings and paintings of artists for the past two hundred years. Woodward finds beauty in the "neglected" ruins, the old sites where nature has nudged the surfaces with wild flowers, mosses, crawling vines, and ground swells, preferring this respect for times past to the wild flurry of the preservationists who seek to 'restore' these treasures to their 'original glory' but often invite tourism with its adjunctive sales, stands, and souvenirs. He has visited the ruins of Rome, of Sicily, Cuba, England, etc and is distraught when he finds these various havens for poets sequestered with guardrails and other implements of distraction. "..the artist is inevitably at odds with the archeologist. In the latter discipline the scattered fragments of stone are parts of a jigsaw, or clues to a puzzle to which there is only one answer, as in a science laboratory; to the artist, by contrast, any answer which is imaginative is correct." "What [poet] Shelley's experience shows is that the vegetation which grows on ruins appeals to the depths of our consciousness, for it represents the hand of Time, and the contest between the individual and the universe." Of the 'Picturesque Movement' in England, Woodward writes referring to the latter day artist John Piper "I know perfectly well I would rather paint a ruined abbey half-covered with ivy and standing in long grass than I would paint it after if has been taken over by the Office of Works, when they've taken of all the ivy and mown all the grass." Woodward talks about even the transporting of ruins from, say, Libya to England (as per King George IV in 1827 importing the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna to his Gardens at Virginia Water). "A ruin is a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator." And finally in his thoughts on war monuments and memorials he writes "Is it ever possible to preserve the 'strange beauty' of war, to capture the moment of 'dust in the air suspended'?"

Each of these eloquently written thoughts and musings is unlike anything else you will find in books on art history, architectural history, or even philosophy. Christopher Woodward has graced our libraries with a little volume that holds dear the intangible, the corporeal transience, the lasting loveliness of man's time on this planet as protected by nature. This is truly a beautiful book that begs for moments of your indulgence, away from the madding crowd.

How often can you read a book that can synthesize practically everything you know, cross reference subject matter, and at the same time inform you about the world and societies as you know them in a way that is informative to people possessing a high level of aesthetics and knowlege of history, art, and literature. There are few books like this for us, but this is one. Essential to expanding your point of view.

Its' difficult to describe this book, or even what its about...but I couldn't put it down for two days (The time it took to read it). I suppose the best way to describe reading it is that is was like sitting down at a nice pub by the fire and listening to a very, very interesting person speak.

Woodward has that all too rare combination of being extraordinarily intelligent, thinking and feeling, and able to express it.

Have you ever looked at a ruin, and found your imagination running away? Have ever wondered why ruins seem to evoke more thought from people -from poets like Shelly (covered in the book) and artists of the Romantic period?

Short of going there and contemplating yourself, this book is the next best thing, in fact, i would recommend if before anyone goest to see

What a wonderful, dusty, fern-festooned treasure hunt of a book this tome is! Young Mr. Woodward has a sympathetic vibration in his soul for ruins, and communicates this passion to the reader most convincingly. Ruins of all kinds in Europe and the UK are explored here: Edwardian houses, medieval abbeys, Italian towns and palaces that were victims of recent earthquakes, the great Roman ruins, artificial ruins for the gardens of cultured gentry, and even imaginary ruins, Picturesque-era paintings of landmarks as they might appear after the fall of civilization.

The usual Romantic era luminaries make appearances: Byron, the Shelleys, Keats, inspired by the Italian ruins to reflect on the grandeur that was Rome. Possibly the saddest passage is on the destruction of English country manors, which had been commandeered by the army during WWII, and were beyond the owners' ability to repair at war's end. Woodward says that so many of these were destroyed in the Fifties that the loss to British heritage rivals that of the Dissolution of 1536, when the abbeys were closed by Henry VIII.

This is a ramble, not a tour, so don't expect a clearly laid out thesis. Strikingly, Woodward's strongest expression of nostalgia is not for the famous ruins as they were when they were intact, but for when they were overgrown and seldom-visited. He relates Stendhal's account of a visit to the Colosseum, where the traveler saw an Englishman riding his horse on the floor of the arena. "I wish that could be me," grumps Woodward. From him I learn that there was even a book published in the 1850s, cataloging the plantlife growing on the Colosseum. Some of it was quite exotic, the seeds having been brought there with the wild animals for the circuses. Now the place is well hosed with weedkiller.

Ruins of such antiquity are not found in my area of the world, apart from Indian mounds. But wherever you live, a book like this will cause you to gaze at your surroundings with a keener eye for the past.

To read In Ruins cover to cover is a continuous delight, but you could dip in anywhere and find yourself enthralled in an instant. Michael Woodward has a well-stored memory but wears his erudition lightly. He is now the director of the Holburne Museum of Arts in Bath, but his book surely reflects the five years he worked in Sir Hans Soane's museum in London. That incredible collection, housed in Soane's own home and left, by his direction when he bequeathed it to the nation, exactly as it was at his death, is a wondrous assemblage of antiquities. It appears chaotically haphazard but indeed was not, and the contents of this book have something of the same quality. Vignettes, quotations, anecdotes, reminiscences of journeys among ruins, romantic elegies, musings deeply felt, pour helter-skelter from Woodward's lively mind. The book has its structures; it has its themes. They are not starkly revealed but the underpinnings are there.
Woodward's opening chapter launches us, appropriately, in Rome. The Romans believed their city of 800,000 people was eternal and why not? Rome had walls ten miles long studded with 376 towers, crossed by nineteen aqueducts feeding more than 1,200 drinking fountains and close to a thousand public baths and the whole decorated with 3,785 statues - and all this dwarfed by colossal public buildings. How could such magnificence perish? The extraordinarily elaborate water supply provides the clue. The barbarians broke the aqueducts and soon the population was a poverty-stricken remnant, perhaps 30,000, huddled beside the Tiber. "From the fall of classical Rome until the eighteenth century" Woodward reminds us, "the only houses in the Forum were the cottages of lime-burners and the hovels of beggars and thieves." What were left were magnificent ruins and those ruins have inspired poets, artists, philosophers and theologians down the centuries. They even inspired the Fuhrer who after his first state visit to Rome decreed that all Nazi monuments should be built of marble, brick and stone - no concrete. The ruins of the 1,000-year Reich must be suitably grandiose - that is, like Roman ruins! And how grandiose the Roman ruins were! In the Middle Ages men thought the ruins of the baths of Caracalla were the work of giants. The chapter is chiefly devoted, however, to the Colosseum, and a whole series of characteristic reflections and vignettes, stories and quotations from literary visitors of different centuries. He also laments - not for the last time - the work of those who have destroyed an extraordinarily inspiring ruin in their efforts to preserve a monument. "Poets and painters like ruins, and dictators like monuments." The Colosseum was once a giant's garden haunted by owls and nightingales. Now it is sterile. It is a recurring theme. Ruins are important in their own right, not just because of what they once were, and should not be relentlessly cleaned up and re-pointed to make them permanently monumental. The trees, shrubs, creepers and flowers, are all part of the inspiration of ruins: "bare ruined choirs in which the sweet birds sing."
Through successive chapters we follow Woodward's schoolboy steps to Verulam (Roman St Albans) and share his disappointment that the walls were insignificantly low: Roman ruins but nowhere near so grand as the ruins of Rome. The older Christopher, however, sees them as an exemplar that reminds us of the mortality not just of Man but of his works. Francis Bacon, ennobled by his king, took "Verulam" as his title to remind himself that all pomp and state is but passing vanity. Woodward follows the footsteps of the tormented ploughman poet, John Clare, to a ruined arch and scattered stones, all that survives of a town destroyed in the Wars of the Roses. There he was inspired to write "Elegy on the ruins of Pickworth". Bitter at the inequalities of wealth he saw around him Clare was consoled by the "exemplary frailty" of men's possessions.
At first I marvelled at Woodward's courage in boldly inviting comparison with Rose Macaulay's justly famed The Pleasure of Ruins. He had nothing to fear. It stands the comparison very well. Late in the book he devotes a long admiring passage to Macaulay's extraordinary life. She was, he tells us, an early and potent inspiration and it shows.

To be honest, I am surprised that a book like this was even able to find a publisher. An extended essay on the quirky subject of ruins is not something that I think would stand out as a potential bestseller in an editor's eyes. Fortunately, someone took the chance and we have access to this interesting little book.

In it, Woodward takes us through the subject of ruins. Not only ruins we can still see today but also ruins that have disappeared over time. Not only physical ruins but also ruins that can be seen in and have influenced art and literature both classic and modern. Not only an objective account of the formation and impact of the ruin but also his visceral impressions and those of other observers both famous and not.

One wouldn't think there was enough about ruins to fill 250 pages but this book proves that misconception false. In fact, there is a lot here that I wasn't aware of or didn't give much thought to before. For example, I tend to think of ruins in the classical sense (such as Roman or Greek ruins) but Woodward also discusses the effect dealing with the ruins of recent wars (in particular, WWII) has had on people. He also discusses the trend in vogue a few hundred years ago towards the wealthy actually building ruins as objects d'arte on their estates. I never realized that some of the ruins one can see while traveling through England and France were in reality artificially created.

Anyone who has ever marveled at the Colosseum or Parthenon, anyone who has ever meditated inside the crumbling walls of an old abbey, anyone who has ever wondered about that abandoned house down the street, anyone who has read Shelly's The Last Man or been shocked by the final frames of Planet of the Apes, will find something of value in Woodward's pages.