The Great Wall in 50 Objects - Tapa blanda

Críticas

William Lindesay has a knack for approaching the iconic Great Wall of China in ways that are creative, idiosyncratic, and deeply personal . . . He has succeeded again with The Great Wall in 50 Objects

(Peter Hessler, author of 'River Town' and 'Oracle Bones')

Lindesay presents a coherent and highly informative account of the geography, history, and material culture of China's Great Wall. His compelling and well-written account is rich in profound and often quite unexpected insights (Lothar von Falkenhausen, Professor of Chinese Archaeology and Art History, UCLA)

William Lindesay shows us the Wall in a completely new light by looking at the smaller objects that make up its history . . . Through these objects we feel the Great Wall transform from architecture into a living part of the history and culture of China (Jack Weatherford, author of 'Genghis Khan' and the 'Making of the Modern World')

China's Great Wall is both a monument and a mystery, an almost magical construction mixing beauty and terror. No better book panders to our fascination with its grandeur and the details of its construction. William Lindesay answers our wish to get closer to the people who built it and lived with it by revealing so many aspects of the Wall, taking us a journey across the centuries and its vast length (Jasper Becker, author of 'City of Heavenly Tranquility' and 'Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine')

For years, Lindesay has hiked and studied the Great Wall with exceptional passion. To him, it seems, the Great Wall is not a mere structure, a political icon, or a cultural curiosity, but a treasure trove of stories (Jaime FlorCruz, former Beijing bureau chief of Time magazine and CNN)

If you are going to China, and intend to see the Great Wall (or even if, unwisely, you don't), take this book on the plane with you, and absorb as many of its intriguing nuggets of Wall-lore and China-lore as you can it will make your visit infinitely richer (Prof. Christopher Cullen, Emeritus Director, Needham Research Institute, Cambridge)

William Lindesay lives and breathes Great Wall history and he exudes it with an engaging passion (Mike Loades, author of 'Swords and Swordsmen')

Reseña del editor

The culmination of a lifetime's field work and research, William Lindesay selects 50 artefacts to tell the story of the Great Wall from the 2nd century B.C. to the late-twentieth century.

Much like an excavation, from the survey beforehand to the foundations, the core, and eventually the ruins, Lindesay explores the majesty of the Wall through the objects it has inspired such as the appearance of the Wall in Ortelius' atlas of the world to the unexpected origins of 'wolf smoke', proliferation of the blunderbuss in the 15th century Great Wall theatre of war, and Kafka's classic short story At the Building of the Great Wall. E

Enhanced by stories of the discovery of the objects, and those of their modern-day keepers from curators to collectors, each artefact has been meticulously researched and recorded. The Great Wall in 50 Objects celebrates the history and the legacy of a world wonder.