Journey through Ruins - Softcover
A pensioner falls over and drowns in a puddle on the pavement. The council tower blocks are inhabited by tenants who feel like outlaws in the middle of the city. The author gives his views of London as a city of frantic rhetoric and failing services.
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Review:
The chapter on the national trust is among the best and most original writing...I've ever read. (Vera Rule, The Guardian)
From the Back Cover:
'A Journey Through Ruins' is a fascinating, seminal and unique portrait of Britain. From his pointed observations of East London – especially of its post-war reconstruction – Patrick Wright builds an arresting, controversial new understanding of this country from the ruins of the past. With a meticulous, mischievous eye for extracting the true meaning of everyday events and objects, Wright focuses on a culture that, in the very process of offering paternalistic care for its people, has veered dangerously off-course – but he also spots some rays of light and zest for life to be savoured and nurtured.
“A funny and perceptive book which is part oral history and part journalism, part generalization and part scholarship – an intriguing and attractive amalgam”
PETER ACKROYD, 'The Times'
“Astute and imaginative ... An immensely heartening book ... Here is a city dweller with the gusto of Baudelaire and the eye of Jane Jacobs who, undeterred by dog shit and bullshit, enjoys the chaotic humanity, the ironic architectural juxtapositions, the 'esprit de jeu' of late twentieth-century London”
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
“The big buzz that comes from reading Patrick Wright’s historiographical jaunt through the post-war junk landscape ... is its ‘cool topicality’”
FINANCIAL TIMES
“Wright belongs in a select club of literary sleuths who have imagined London as a labyrinth of strange affinities ... A pin-sharp miniaturist who can see the world in a grain of sand”
OBSERVER
“Sheer good writing, sense and humanity”
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
“Essential reading”
iD
FULLY UPDATED WITH A NEW CHAPTER
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherRadius
- Publication date1992
- ISBN 10 0091753295
- ISBN 13 9780091753290
- BindingPaperback
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