Book Review: "Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings" by James Crawford

This book will have a special place in my reading history as the first book that I started and finished during quarantine! I might have to make a special shelf for that on my goodreads page :)

This books is large, more than 500 pages but chapters are shortish and self contained. They are also in chronological order so you could do some skipping around if you would like and it won't hinder you. It starts way way back in the day with the OG of doomed architectural projects  - Tower of Babel and  ends (almost) with the World Trade Center/One World Trade. (Hello all the feelings on that chapter). If you're like "Wesley, Im not a structural engineer - I don't care about i-beams and load bearing walls" I would say do not fret my friend, it is a book more focused on the historical than the logistical and engineeri..cal.

Here are a few of my favorite tidbits:

- The Russians took a bunch of artifacts from the excavation of Troy in Turkey at the end of World War II as trophies, you can find them in the Russian State Museum.

- So many interesting facts about the Library of Alexandria: if you were coming into the city and you had a book you had to immediatley report to the library and if they didn't already have that book you had to hand it over. They would copy it and you would get the copy back and they would keep the original. Which is such a hard librarian flex. I hate it but respect it haha.You gotta have a plan if you want a copy of every book ever made, right?

-Did you know that a "milestone" is a symbolic central point of a city from which all of the distances within the city is measure from? Like if I was like "how far is it from Rome to Florence?" the distance is measured from their milestones.

-St Paul's Cathedral is the first English cathedral to be completed within the lifetime of it's original designer

-The guy who designed the Bastille in Paris was it's first prisoner - accused of, among other things, sexual acts with a Jewish woman

-There's a whole chapter on Panopticon prisons and it's bananas

-If you look at Berlin from space you can still see the divide where the Wall was - some will say it's because of the different street lamp lights, some will say it's because of standing economic differences #probsboth.

I really liked this book, it was a good friend during a weird time. 4 out of 5 stars!