front cover of Bonelight
Bonelight
Ruin And Grace In The New Southwest
Mary Sojourner
University of Nevada Press, 2004
When upstate New Yorker Mary Sojourner reluctantly agreed to visit the Grand Canyon of Arizona, she little suspected that she was about to lose her heart to the beauty of the Southwest, or that she would shortly find a passion for the land, and a cause in protecting it. She has since gained notoriety as an environmental writer and as a grass-roots activist protesting the heedless development of the Southwest's increasingly precious and embattled open spaces. The essays collected here reflect Sojourner's journey from greenhorn to old-timer, from tourist to committed defender of the land and the human communities that share it. She writes of exploring the deserts, forests, mountains, and river rapids of the Southwest, and of her love for this austere and ravishing landscape; of family, friends, and lovers; of the ways that development is destroying the Southwest's fragile beauty; and of the greed and spiritual emptiness that motivate much of this development. There is humor here, and adventure, and the intensity of a writer who confronts the world around her with bold candor and a lover's tender gaze.
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The Book of Ruin
Rigoberto González
Four Way Books, 2019
These poems consider the history of the Americas and their uncertain future, particularly regarding the danger of climate change, and suggest a line from colonialism toward a shattering “Apocalipsixtlán.”
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Building a Ruin
The Cold War Politics of Soviet Economic Reform
Yakov Feygin
Harvard University Press, 2024

A masterful account of the global Cold War’s decisive influence on Soviet economic reform, and the national decay that followed.

What brought down the Soviet Union? From some perspectives the answers seem obvious, even teleological—communism was simply destined to fail. When Yakov Feygin studied the question, he came to another conclusion: at least one crucial factor was a deep contradiction within the Soviet political economy brought about by the country’s attempt to transition from Stalinist mass mobilization to a consumer society.

Building a Ruin explores what happened in the Soviet Union as institutions designed for warfighting capacity and maximum heavy industrial output were reimagined by a new breed of reformers focused on “peaceful socioeconomic competition.” From Khrushchev on, influential schools of Soviet planning measured Cold War success in the same terms as their Western rivals: productivity, growth, and the availability of abundant and varied consumer goods. The shift was both material and intellectual, with reformers taking a novel approach to economics. Instead of trumpeting their ideological bona fides and leveraging their connections with party leaders, the new economists stressed technical expertise. The result was a long and taxing struggle for the meaning of communism itself, as old-guard management cadres clashed with reformers over the future of central planning and the state’s relationship to the global economic order.

Feygin argues that Soviet policymakers never resolved these tensions, leading to stagnation, instability, and eventually collapse. Yet the legacy of reform lingers, its factional dynamics haunting contemporary Russian politics.

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Every Form of Ruin
Poems
Erin Adair-Hodges
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
A rebuttal to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Every Form of Ruin posits the Erinyes’ fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra’s rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia’s relegation to a footnoted sacrifice. A fierce and darkly funny examination of anger, these lyrical poems push back against silencing by paying witness to a world where the experiences of women, nonbinary, and femme-identifying people are too often ignored, their responses dismissed as hysterical. These poems are also investigations into the loneliness of mid-life; the search for one’s own self when that self has given its life to service. Every Form of Ruin counters our culture’s erasure of women and resists the categorizations of maiden, mother, crone by blurring those distinctions through the creation of voices that are moved by rage and resistance. 
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Lost Homelands
Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest
Audrey Goodman
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Before the 1930s, landscapes of the American Southwest represented the migrant’s dream of a stable and bountiful homeland. Around the time of the Great Depression, however, the Southwest suddenly became integrated into a much larger economic and cultural system. Audrey Goodman examines how—since that time—these southwestern landscapes have come to reveal the resulting fragmentation of identity and community.

Through analyzing a variety of texts and images, Goodman illuminates the ways that modern forces such as militarization, environmental degradation, internal migration, and an increased border patrol presence have shattered the perception of a secure homeland in the Southwest. The deceptive natural beauty of the Southwest deserts shields a dark history of trauma and decimation that has remained as a shadow on the region’s psyche. The first to really synthesize such wide-ranging material about the effects of the atomic age in the Southwest, Goodman realizes the value of combined visual and verbal art and uses it to put forth her own original ideas about reconstructing a new sense of homeland.

Lost Homelands reminds us of the adversity and dislocation suffered by people of the Southwest by looking at the ways that artists, photographers, filmmakers, and writers have grappled with these problems for decades. In assessing the ruination of the region, however, Goodman argues that those same artists and writers have begun to reassemble a new sense of homeland from these fragments.
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Ruin
Beppe Fenoglio
Northwestern University Press, 1992
Ruin is an acclaimed 1954 novel by Italian Beppe Fenoglio. It's the story of Augustine Braida, a boy who serves the Rabino family, whose first-person account of life in Langhe paints a vivid portrait of  early twentieth-century Italian peasant life. Told with terrible humility and great force, it is a compassionate and harrowing narrative of peasant endurance in the face of overwhelming hardship.

Born into a working-class family in the town of Alba lying in that part of the Piedmont called LeLanghe, Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963) belonged to the generation of young Italian writers whose works were molded by their World War II experience and the anti-Fascist Resistance many took part in. Fenoglio fought as a partisan against the German troops occupying Italy, and the major part of his literature is connected with the events of the time.
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The Ruin of Kasch
Roberto Calasso
Harvard University Press, 1994
In this brilliant work, Roberto Calasso cracks the code of what Baudelaire named the Modern--the increasingly murderous period from the French Revolution to the end of World War II. From Talleyrand's France and the legendary African city of Kasch, to Lenin's Russia and the killing fields of Cambodia, Calasso leads us along an enticing maze of mythology, literature, art, and science to the pulsing heart of civilization, where he deciphers the deepest secrets of history.
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Ruin the Sacred Truths
Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present
Harold Bloom
Harvard University Press, 1989
Harold Bloom surveys with majestic view the literature of the West from the Old Testament to Samuel Beckett. He provocatively rereads the Yahwist (or J) writer, Jeremiah, Job, Jonah, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, the Henry IV plays, Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and works by Freud, Kafka, and Beckett. In so doing, he uncovers the truth that all our attempts to call any strong work more sacred than another are merely political and social formulations. This is criticism at its best.
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Treadwell Gold
An Alaska Saga of Riches and Ruin
Sheila Kelly
University of Alaska Press, 2010

A century ago, Treadwell, Alaska, was a featured stop on steamship cruises, a rich, up-to-date town that was the most prominent and proud in all Alaska. Its wealth, however, was founded on the remarkably productive gold mines on Douglas Island, and when those caved in and flooded in the early decades of the twentieth century, Treadwell sank into relative obscurity. 

Treadwell Gold
presents first-person accounts from the sons and daughters of the miners, machinists, hoist operators, and superintendents who together dug and blasted the gold that made Treadwell rich. Alongside these stories are vintage photos that capture both the industrial vigor of the mines and the daily lives that made up Treadwell society. The book will fascinate anyone interested in Alaskan history or the romance of gold mining’s past.

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Urban Legends
The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin
Peter L’Official
Harvard University Press, 2020

A cultural history of the South Bronx that reaches beyond familiar narratives of urban ruin and renaissance, beyond the “inner city” symbol, to reveal the place and people obscured by its myths.

For decades, the South Bronx was America’s “inner city.” Synonymous with civic neglect, crime, and metropolitan decay, the Bronx became the preeminent symbol used to proclaim the failings of urban places and the communities of color who lived in them. Images of its ruins—none more infamous than the one broadcast live during the 1977 World Series: a building burning near Yankee Stadium—proclaimed the failures of urbanism.

Yet this same South Bronx produced hip hop, arguably the most powerful artistic and cultural innovation of the past fifty years. Two narratives—urban crisis and cultural renaissance—have dominated understandings of the Bronx and other urban environments. Today, as gentrification transforms American cities economically and demographically, the twin narratives structure our thinking about urban life.

A Bronx native, Peter L’Official draws on literature and the visual arts to recapture the history, people, and place beyond its myths and legends. Both fact and symbol, the Bronx was not a decades-long funeral pyre, nor was hip hop its lone cultural contribution. L’Official juxtaposes the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s carvings of abandoned buildings with the city’s trompe l’oeil decals program; examines the centrality of the Bronx’s infamous Charlotte Street to two Hollywood films; offers original readings of novels by Don DeLillo and Tom Wolfe; and charts the emergence of a “global Bronx” as graffiti was brought into galleries and exhibited internationally, promoting a symbolic Bronx abroad.

Urban Legends presents a new cultural history of what it meant to live, work, and create in the Bronx.

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