On December 7, 1941, Japan devastated the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. While war had been raging in Europe and in Asia for years, this unprovoked attack drew the United States into the most disruptive and wasteful cataclysm in human historythe Second World War. While history books speak to the battles and historical figures pivotal to the outcome of the war, there were also ordinary peopleboth civilian and uniformedwho were propelled out of their comfort zones by unforeseen events and adventures. Paradise in Ruins is a historical novel that unleashes an eclectic cast of characters who, tired of being constantly overlooked in World War II histories, finally have a chance to speak. Combining together a cast of civilian men and women, naval and military officers, and Pacific Islanders with the stories of real historical figures, author Antwyn Prices extensive research provides a compelling, personal view into the struggles and irrevocably changed lives of the men and women in the Asia-Pacific region before, during, and after the war. Covering both the Nimitz and MacArthur campaigns from 1941 to 1946, stories about these lives will unfold from Canton Island to Sydney; from Pearl Harbor to Guam; from Espiritu Santo and Nouma to Guadalcanal and Bougainville; from New Guinea to the Philippines; and from Iwo Jima and Peleliu to Okinawa and Tokyo. Anyone curious about the Pacific War will be able to stitch the events together so that the geography, peoples, logistics, and strategies can be more easily understood.

After laying out these theoretical foundations, Loureiro puts them to work in analyzing four of the most fascinating autobiographies written by Spanish exiles: The Life of Joseph Blanco White, who lived from 1775 to 1841, Memoria de la Melancolia by Maria Teresa Leon (1904-1988), Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa by Juan Goytisolo (born 1931), and Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun (born 1923). The lives of these authors, all of whom were exiled for political reasons, were disrupted by some of the most crucial events in Spain's tortuous road to modernity and democracy. The book closes with a discussion of why there have been so few critical examinations of autobiographies written in modern Spain. Loureiro proposes that, even in today's Spain, stifling social and political forces smother ethical responsibility, which is an essential ingredient in creating autobiographies that dare to be more than a humdrum inventory of personal recollections.

One of the most common scenes in Augustan and Romantic literature is that of a writer confronting some emblem of change and loss, most often the remains of a vanished civilization or a desolate natural landscape. Ruins and Empire traces the ruin sentiment from its earliest classical and Renaissance expressions through English literature to its establishment as a dominant theme of early American art.

Images of ruins may represent the raw realities created by bombs, natural disasters, or factory closings, but the way we see and understand ruins is not raw or unmediated. Rather, looking at ruins, writing about them, and representing them are acts framed by a long tradition. This unique interdisciplinary collection traces discourses about and representations of ruins from a richly contextualized perspective. In the introduction, Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle discuss how European modernity emerged partly through a confrontation with the ruins of the premodern past. Several contributors discuss ideas about ruins developed by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin. One contributor examines how W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn betrays the ruins erased or forgotten in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Another analyzes the repressed specter of being bombed out of existence that underpins post-Second World War modernist architecture, especially Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris. Still another compares the ways that formerly dominant white populations relate to urban-industrial ruins in Detroit and to colonial ruins in Namibia. Other topics include atomic ruins at a Nevada test site, the connection between the cinema and ruins, the various narratives that have accrued around the Inca ruin of Vilcashuamán, Tolstoy’s response in War and Peace to the destruction of Moscow in the fire of 1812, the Nazis’ obsession with imperial ruins, and the emergence in Mumbai of a new “kinetic city” on what some might consider the ruins of a modernist city. By focusing on the concept of ruin, this collection sheds new light on modernity and its vast ramifications and complexities. Contributors. Kerstin Barndt, Jon Beasley-Murray, Russell A. Berman, Jonathan Bolton, Svetlana Boym, Amir Eshel, Julia Hell, Daniel Herwitz, Andreas Huyssen, Rahul Mehrotra, Johannes von Moltke, Vladimir Paperny, Helen Petrovsky, Todd Presner, Helmut Puff, Alexander Regier, Eric Rentschler, Lucia Saks, Andreas Schönle, Tatiana Smoliarova, George Steinmetz, Jonathan Veitch, Gustavo Verdesio, Anthony Vidler