Monuments


Book Description

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Skyscrapers, Churches, and Bridges comes a stunning visual history that serves as a tribute to classic American landmarks.




Grassroots Memorials


Book Description

Grassroots memorials have become major areas of focus during times of trauma, danger, and social unrest. These improvised memorial assemblages continue to display new and more dynamic ways of representing collective and individual identities and in doing so reveal the steps that shape the national memories of those who struggle to come to terms with traumatic loss. This volume focuses on the hybrid quality of these temporary memorials as both monuments of mourning and as focal points for protest and expression of discontent. The broad range of case studies in this volume include anti-mafia shrines, Theo van Gogh’s memorial, September 11th memorials, March 11th shrines in Madrid, and Carlo Giuliani memorials in Genoa.




Disaster Memorials and Monuments


Book Description

Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Disaster Memorials and Monuments: History, Context and Practice from around the World presents a wide-ranging understanding and exploration on memorials and monuments built in the aftermath of accidents, natural disasters and acts of violence. Disaster management expert, Kjell Brataas, provides a compassionate voice to difficult and complex situations as well as practical advice based on lessons learned through academic research, site visits and personal experience. Brataas illustrates a wide range of monuments and memorial projects from all over the world and explains the process of their creation and the challenges that occur in memorialization processes. He further proposes strategies for dealing with trials and controversies in similar future developments. Features include: Personal interviews with key stakeholders in the field of memorializing, psychology and victim support, who have first-hand experience with memorial projects Insights, lessons learned and advice from scholars, professors, politicians, support group leaders, survivors, bereaved, community leaders and neighbors Reporting on more than 80 memorials from around the world, including New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Sahara, Chile, Japan and South Korea Suggested reading, including books, reports and presentations on the topic Disaster Memorials and Monuments: History, Context and Practice from around the World is important reading for all practicing professionals, for those who study and teach the importance and the process of developing memorials and monuments and for everyone interested in crisis management and the aftermath of disasters.




Five Days at Memorial


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning book that inspired an Apple Original series from Apple TV+ • A landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina—and the suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning physician and reporter “An amazing tale, as inexorable as a Greek tragedy and as gripping as a whodunit.”—Dallas Morning News After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs. Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink, unspools the mystery, bringing us inside a hospital fighting for its life and into the most charged questions in health care: which patients should be prioritized, and can health care professionals ever be excused for hastening death? Transforming our understanding of human nature in crisis, Five Days at Memorial exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals how ill-prepared we are for large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, Entertainment Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star WINNER: National Book Critics Circle Award, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Ridenhour Book Prize, American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award, National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award




Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials


Book Description

This collection of newly published essays examines our relationship to physical objects that invoke, commemorate, and honor the past. The recent destruction of cultural heritage in war and controversies over Civil War monuments in the US have foregrounded the importance of artifacts that embody history. The book invites us to ask: How do memorials convey their meanings? What is our responsibility for the preservation or reconstruction of historically significant structures? How should we respond when the public display of a monument divides a community? This anthology includes coverage of the destruction of Palmyra and the Bamiyan Buddhas, the loss of cultural heritage through war and natural disasters, the explosive controversies surrounding Confederate-era monuments, and the decay of industry in the U.S. Rust Belt. The authors consider issues of preservation and reconstruction, the nature of ruins, the aesthetic and ethical values of memorials, and the relationship of cultural memory to material artifacts that remain from the past. Written by a leading group of philosophers, art historians, and archeologists, the 23 chapters cover monuments and memorials from Dubai to Detroit, from the instant destruction of Hiroshima to the gradual sinking of Venice.




From Memory to Memorial


Book Description

On September 11, 2001, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, became a center of national attention when United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a former strip mine in sleepy Somerset County, killing all forty passengers and crew aboard. This is the story of the memorialization that followed, from immediate, unofficial personal memorials to the ten-year effort to plan and build a permanent national monument to honor those who died. It is also the story of the unlikely community that developed through those efforts. As the country struggled to process the events of September 11, temporary memorials—from wreaths of flowers to personalized T-shirts and flags—appeared along the chain-link fences that lined the perimeter of the crash site. They served as evidence of the residents’ need to pay tribute to the tragedy and of the demand for an official monument. Weaving oral accounts from Shanksville residents and family members of those who died with contemporaneous news reports and records, J. William Thompson traces the creation of the monument and explores the larger narrative of memorialization in America. He recounts the crash and its sobering immediate impact on area residents and the nation, discusses the history of and controversies surrounding efforts to permanently commemorate the event, and relates how locals and grief-stricken family members ultimately bonded with movers and shakers at the federal level to build the Flight 93 National Memorial. A heartfelt examination of memory, place, and the effects of tragedy on small-town America, this fact-driven account of how the Flight 93 National Memorial came to be is a captivating look at the many ways we strive as communities to forever remember the events that change us.




Monument Builders


Book Description

This is a study of buildings created to honour the dead. It explores the links between socio-religious and existential perceptions of death and how this has been interpreted in architecture over the 20th century.




The Stages of Memory


Book Description

Introduction. The memorial's vernacular arc between Berlin's Denkmal and New York City's 9/11 Memorial -- The stages of memory at Ground Zero: the National 9/11 Memorial process -- Daniel Libeskind and the houses of Jewish memory: what is Jewish architecture? -- Regarding the pain of women: gender and the arts of holocaust memory -- The terrible beauty of Nazi aesthetics -- Looking into the mirrors of evil: Nazi imagery in contemporary art at the Jewish Museum in New York -- The contemporary arts of memory in the works of Esther Shalev-Gerz, Miroslaw Balka, Tobi Kahn, and Komar and Melamid -- Utøya and Norway's July 22 memorial: the memory of political terror.




Disaster Memorials and Monuments


Book Description

"Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Disaster Memorials and Monuments: History, Context and Practice from around the World presents a wide-ranging understanding and exploration on memorials and monuments built in the aftermath of accidents, natural disasters and acts of violence. Disaster management expert, Kjell Brataas gives provides a compassionate voice to difficult and complex situations as well as practical advice based on lessons learnt through academic research, site visits and personal experience. Brataas illustrates a wide range of monuments and memorial projects from all over the world and explains the process of their creation and the challenges that occur in memorialization processes. He further proposes strategies for dealing with trials and controversies in similar future developments. Features include: Personal interviews with key stakeholders in the field of memorization, psychology and victim support, who have first-hand experience with memorial projects. Insights, lessons learned and advice from scholars, professors, politicians, support group leaders, survivors, bereaved, community leaders and neighbors. Reporting on more than 80 memorials from around the world, including New Zealand, Halifax, Las Vegas, Newtown, Sahara, Chile, Japan and Seoul. Suggested reading, including books, reports and presentations on the topic. Disaster Memorials and Monuments: History, Context and Practice from around the World is important reading for all practicing professionals, for those who study and teach the importance and the process of developing memorials and monuments, and for everyone interested in crisis management and the aftermath of disasters"--




Memorial Mania


Book Description

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express—and claim—those issues in visibly public contexts. Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.