The City of Sand

The City of Sand

Author: Tianxia Bachang

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Published: 2017-11-21

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0553524119

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A multimillion-copy bestseller in China—now available in English! In this heart-pounding adventure, a group of individuals who have come together for an expedition, each with a specific interest, soon find themselves motivated by one common goal: the sheer will to survive. THE QUEST: To find the lost city of Jingjue, a once-glorious kingdom, along with the burial chamber of its mysterious queen. Both lie buried under the golden dunes of the desert, where fierce sandstorms and blazing heat show no mercy. THE TEAM: Teenagers Tianyi, who has the ability read the earth and sky through feng shui, and Kai, Tianyi’s best friend and confidant; Julie, a wealthy American whose father vanished on the same trek a year ago; Professor Chen, who wants to fulfill a lifelong dream; and Asat Amat, a local guide gifted in desert survival. THE OBSTACLES: Lethal creatures of the desert and an evil force that wants to entomb the explorers under the unforgiving sands of China’s Taklimakan Desert forever. Translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, whose recent work includes NEVER GROW UP, the translation from Chinese of the autobiography from action movie superstar Jackie Chan.


Cities in the Sand

Cities in the Sand

Author: Kenneth D. Matthews

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2018-12-02

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1789127270

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Today, the ancient Roman towns of Leptis Magana and Sabratha on the Mediterranean cost of Libya attract only a few curious travelers. But two thousand years ago they were thriving commercial and agricultural centers whose value to Rome was measured by the wealth of produce shipped annually to the cities of the Empire. This volume is primarily an introduction to the personality of these two towns, recovered by archaeologists from the burying sands only in relatively recent years. The text offers a concise and informative survey of the history of the history of the region known as Tripolitania and examines the cultural and social life of Leptis Magna and Sabratha as reflected in the magnificent ruins depicted in the accompanying plates. The first chapter provides an understanding of Roman government and organization in Africa from the time of Scipio’s destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. until the beginning of Mohammedan rule in 698 A.D. This discussion gives perspective to the life of Leptis Magna and Sabratha by placing it in context with Roman Africa in general, explaining the various political divisions of the Roman provinces as well as the manner of civil and military administration under early imperial Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine rule. The second and third chapters deal, respectively, with the particular ruins of the two towns. Although both Leptis Magana and Sabratha (unlike their sister city Oea, or modern Tripoli) succumbed to the smothering weight of drifting sand dunes, they are made to live again in the pages of this volume. Kenneth Matthews’ text is an excellent summary of life in Roman times, while the photographs by Alfred Cook provide views, unsurpassed in beauty and clarity of detail, of the buildings and art that once flourished along the rim of the Mediterranean Sea.


Cairo

Cairo

Author: Maria Golia

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2004-06-04

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9781861891877

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Maria Golia focuses on the present moment of Cairo, one of the world's most illustrious and irreducible cities.


Sand

Sand

Author: Hugh Howey

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0358716802

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The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Their father was a sand diver, one of the elite few who could travel deep beneath the desert floor and bring up the relics and scraps that keep their people alive. But their father is gone. And the world he left behind might be next. Welcome to the world of Sand, a novel by New York Times best-selling author Hugh Howey. Sand is an exploration of lawlessness, the tale of a land ignored. Here is a people left to fend for themselves. Adjust your ker and take a last, deep breath before you enter.


The Sand Sea

The Sand Sea

Author: Michael McClellan

Publisher: Story Grid Publishing LLC

Published: 2020-06-24

Total Pages: 1027

ISBN-13: 1645010228

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"An astounding epic novel of J.R.R. Tolkien proportions!" — Steven Pressfield, Bestselling author of Gates of Fire and The War of Art Raiders of the Lost Ark playing A Game of Thrones The Sand Sea takes place on an alternative Earth roiled by war and conquest that mirrors our own Gilded Age. The treasure that ignites greed and folly in this parallel world is not petroleum, but beserite—a mineral of immeasurable value. Captivated by an ancient prophecy and the call of adventure, inexperienced nobleman and scholar Peter Harmon (think of a young Winston Churchill-like naif) joins an expedition to stake his nation’s claim to a global empire. Harmon’s destination is a vast and inhospitable desert halfway around the world, dominated by the iron-fisted Grand Vizer Jemojeen Jongdar. A tyrant on a mission to secure the ancient and supernatural Staff of the Ram, the Lion, and the Serpent, Jongdar knows the truth that others can only imagine: The one who controls the staff will possess the power to rule the world. Before he can seize his destiny, Jongdar must find and destroy the one person capable of thwarting his ambition, the rightful heir to the Sand Sea realm, an innocent woman named Selena Savanar. Can the brave and indomitable Selena accept her true destiny and rally her people in the eye of a gathering storm? To do so will require her to outwit the man who burned her father alive and left her an orphan and beggar a lifetime ago. Or will Peter Harmon and the cadre of opportunists he rides with conquer the divided empire? With the mythic structure of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in a world as rich and real as George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, The Sand Sea is an immersive experience made to order for epic fantasy fans and anyone who enjoys grand-scale historical fiction.


Cities of Salt

Cities of Salt

Author: ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 650

ISBN-13:

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Spell-binding evocation of Bedouin life in the 1930s when oil is discovered by Americans in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom.


Built on Sand

Built on Sand

Author: Paul Scraton

Publisher: Influx Press

Published: 2019-04-25

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1910312347

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Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, you'll soon hit sand. The stories of Berlin are the stories Built on Sand. A wooden town, laid waste by the Thirty Years War that became the metropolis by the Spree that spread out and swallowed villages whole. The city of Rosa Luxemburg and Joseph Roth, of student movements and punks on both sides of the Wall. A place still bearing the scars of National Socialism and the divided city that emerged from the wreckage of war. Built on Sand. centres on the personal geographies of place, and how memory and history live on in the individual and collective imagination. Stories of landscapes and a city both real and imagined; stories of exile and trauma, mythology and folklore; of how the past shapes and distorts our understanding of the present in an age of individualism, gentrification and the rising threat of nativism and far-right populism. Together, these stories offer a portrait of a city three decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the legacy of that history in a city that was once divided but remains fractured and fragmented.


Flammable Cities

Flammable Cities

Author: Greg Bankoff

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-01-19

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0299283836

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In most cities today, fire has been reduced to a sporadic and isolated threat. But throughout history the constant risk of fire has left a deep and lasting imprint on almost every dimension of urban society. This volume, the first truly global study of urban conflagration, shows how fire has shaped cities throughout the modern world, from Europe to the imperial colonies, major trade entrepôts, and non-European capitals, right up to such present-day megacities as Lagos and Jakarta. Urban fire may hinder commerce or even spur it; it may break down or reinforce barriers of race, class, and ethnicity; it may serve as a pretext for state violence or provide an opportunity for displays of state benevolence. As this volume demonstrates, the many and varied attempts to master, marginalize, or manipulate fire can turn a natural and human hazard into a highly useful social and political tool.


Sandfuture

Sandfuture

Author: Justin Beal

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0262367181

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An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.