"How landscapes and their histories are depicted matters profoundly and it matters politically. . . . In this wonderfully wide-ranging critique, Beck challenges the easy packaging of landscape and its history as tourist 'heritage' sites, film locations, edgy ruins, or icons of national identity. Exploring pastoral landscapes, industrial sprawl, abandoned ruins, bunkers, and much more, Landscape as Weapon is an essential reminder that how we think of places and their pasts is pivotal to how we live now. Essential reading."
— Stephen Graham, author of "Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers"
"Beck’s Landscape as Weapon is a tour de force of reflective writing that scrutinizes recent artistic, literary, and cultural negotiations with the infrastructural netherworlds and landscapes of late modernity. Developing his arguments with subtlety, criticality, and wit, Beck uses the claims made upon these spaces of contested memory and experience to skillfully build what amounts to a symptomatology of our contemporary historical imagination."
— Mark Dorrian, professor and Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh
"Beck’s probing disquisition on the multiple ways in which representations of the past in history, literature, film, and photography are coming under renewed questioning, is timely and thought-provoking. . . . Landscape as Weapon ranges well beyond rural nostalgia, fake industrial heritage, and historical misrepresentation, to go into the bleaker territory of ruin porn and dark tourism. Here are the blasted heaths of military firing ranges and nuclear testing grounds, the defensive territories cultivated by proponents and activists of bunker ideology, the continuing memorialization of tyrants, where the old and the new, satellite skies and pastoral latifundia, slums and cultural quarters, all sit alongside each other. These are places where, in the words of novelist William Gibson, 'The future is already here but has just not been evenly distributed.' Beck shines a light on all these conundrums, helpfully so."
— Ken Worpole, author of "The New English Landscape"
"Beck's book--his own mediation--opens readers up to a landscape that is not bound to the surface of the earth or a moment in time. It is, following the title, a weapon for continuous social, political, and cultural change."
— Home Front Studies