I have recently been trying to read more nonfiction. The real world is so interesting and it’s fun to find out more. Fallen Glory wouldn’t have been my first choice of nonfiction books though: the lives and deaths of history’s greatest buildings. I don’t know a lot about architecture. However, when I went to the Penguin Teen Tour in March, Marie Lu said she was reading this book, and the way she described it made it seem amazing (she was right).
Fallen Glory is not just a book about a bunch of destroyed buildings. It tells the story of the people that created the buildings and the people that destroyed the buildings. At times, it is a sad reminder of our lost history. For example, the first chapter is the story of the Tower of Babel. While we don’t know exactly where the exact site for the tower was, this book tells about some of the possibilities. It also tells the story of many of the artifacts of the time that were lost during the Iraq War, when thieves broke into an area museum and ransacked it.
It’s the story of buildings lost in both ancient and modern times, from Asia to America, with stops in the Middle East and Europe. With this as a backdrop, the author, James Crawford, weaves a compelling story. Chapter eight, for example, tells the story of the Nika riots in Constantinople. While you may or may not have heard of them before, Crawford gives all the background information you need to know for this to be an interesting story. Even if you’ve never heard of the Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora before.
The book tells stories of the obscure, such as Vilcabamba, to the well-known, like the Bastille. Not knowing about the former didn’t make it less interesting than the latter. Crawford is a great storyteller.
I thought one of the most interesting stories was the chapter on GeoCities, which wasn’t even a real city in the first place. Crawford tells how it was developed and later became popular. Eventually it was bought out by Yahoo! I could write a lot about Yahoo! I remember when they were so small that they still added their entries by hand. Yahoo! eventually closed down GeoCities, and in that one moment, years of early Internet history was erased (although some people were able to archive a lot of the site).
Conclusion
I really liked Fallen Glory. It’s not just a book about buildings: it’s a book about the societies that built the buildings, lived with the buildings, and watched its destruction. The stories it told were interesting. Some buildings I had heard of before, but others were new. Whether they were new to me or not, the stories brought a fresh perspective to the locations. If you’re interested in history ranging from the Tower of Babel to the 21st century, you may enjoy this book.