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.

In 1962, on a rocky patch of sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper looks out over the incandescent waters of the sea and spies a woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. He learns that she is an American starlet who is said to be dying. And the story begins again in the present when half a world away, an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio’s back lot searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives including the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion. Gloriously inventive and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

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.