"With Ghostly Ruins, author Harry Skrdla guides your tour of thirty abandoned locations from around the country - homes and hotels, power plants and prisons, whole neighborhoods and even entire towns. These are the happy memories of your grandparents' and great-grandparents' childhoods, such as the United Artists movie palace in Detroit, the rollercoasters at Chippewa Lake Park in Medina, Ohio, and the Palace of Fine Arts from the Chicago World's Fair." "And then there are the structures that were massive and forbidding even at their peaks, before falling to disrepair: the Bethlehem Steel Mill and Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania and Bannerman's Castle, a munitions depot stranded on a lonely island in upstate New York. Even the works of some of our nation's most revered architects are not impervious to decay. Witness Albert Kahn's Packard Plant and Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion." "Perhaps eeriest of all are the ghost towns of Bodie, California and Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a trash fire in a nearby mine exploded into an underground inferno in 1962. The fire still blazes today. Skrdla shows you all this and more, telling the tale of each place in its prime and the story behind its fall, accompanied by more than two hundred photographs depicting these locations at both yesterday's historic heights and today's decrepit depths."--BOOK JACKET.

Who doesn’t love a good ghost story? This gorgeous book is a compendium of old, forgotten haunted houses imagined by artist Ben Catmull, along with the stories and rumors of who haunts them, and why. Each spread features a different haunted house, lovingly and exquisitely rendered in scratchboard on masonite, with a short, nightmare-inducing description of each scene. In “Drowned Shelley,” for example: A chorus of frogs surrounds the house where young Shelley was drowned headfirst in the bathtub by her drunken stepfather. Say her name 13 times while looking in the pond and she will drown you in your sleep. Say her name the wrong number of times while looking in the pond, and she will leave hair in your breakfast dishes. Say her name 13 times while not looking in the pond, and she will watch you when you clip your toenails. Mispronounce her name 13 times while looking anywhere near the pond, and she will kick you somewhere delicate at the stroke of midnight. Catmull’s images are evocative, haunting masterpieces that never tread in graphic imagery, choosing instead to suggest horrors far more frightening than what they explicitly depict.

Photographer and sociologist Camilo José Vergara has spent years documenting the decline of the built environment in New York City; Newark and Camden, New Jersey; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Chicago; Gary, Indiana; Detroit; and Los Angeles.

Depicts the history of more than one hundred Colorado towns abandoned after the end of the mining boom

Reactions to Derrida vary dramatically: some regard him as a charlatan, as simply nihilistic and irrationalist; others as an extraordinarily clear and patient thinker, concerned with the affirmation and elaboration of a new enlightenment. However construed, his work in the field of deconstruction has been a decisive point of reference and orientation for cultural and intellectual debate in the English-speaking world.

Heather Wiebe's book looks to the music of Benjamin Britten to elucidate a British postwar vision of cultural renewal.