James Crawford

An inviting, fascinating compendium of twenty-one of history's most famous lost places, from the Tower of Babel to the Twin TowersBuildings are more like us than we realize. They can be born into wealth or poverty, enjoying every privilege or struggling to make ends meet. They have parents--gods, kings and emperors, governments, visionaries and madmen--as well as friends and enemies. They have duties and responsibilities. They can endure crises of faith and purpose. They can succeed or fail. They can live. And, sooner or later, they die. In Fallen Glory, James Crawford uncovers the biographies of some of the world's most fascinating lost and ruined buildings, from the dawn of civilization to the cyber era. The lives of these iconic structures are packed with drama and intrigue. Soap operas on the grandest scale, they feature war and religion, politics and art, love and betrayal, catastrophe and hope. Frequently their afterlives have been no less dramatic--their memories used and abused down the millennia for purposes both sacred and profane. They provide the stage for a startling array of characters, including Gilgamesh, the Cretan Minotaur, Agamemnon, Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Catherine the Great, Adolf Hitler, and even Bruce Springsteen. The twenty-one structures Crawford focuses on include The Tower of Babel, The Temple of Jerusalem, The Library of Alexandria, The Bastille, Kowloon Walled City, the Berlin Wall, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Ranging from the deserts of Iraq, the banks of the Nile and the cloud forests of Peru, to the great cities of Jerusalem, Istanbul, Paris, Rome, London and New York, Fallen Glory is a unique guide to a world of vanished architecture. And, by picking through the fragments of our past, it asks what history's scattered ruins can tell us about our own future.

Every High school has its rock star. Maybe it's the quarterback, head cheerleader, or the valedictorian--the one student who outshines the rest. The one everyone knows will be successful in the years to come. For Nolan that was a lifetime ago, before he lost his sight, before he even knew what a Leech was.Now, all Nolan wants is to see Caleo survive to fulfill his destiny. A task that is becoming increasingly difficult as the government wades into the war, new enemies appear and the number of people trying to kill them skyrockets.

Annexed to GA Resolution 56/83 of 2001, the International Law Commission's Articles on Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts put the international law of responsibility on a sound footing. As Special Rapporteur for the second reading, James Crawford helped steer it to a successful conclusion. With this book, he provides a detailed analysis of the general law of international responsibility and the place of state responsibility in particular within that framework. It serves as a companion to The International Law Commission's Articles on State Responsibility: Introduction, Text and Commentaries (Cambridge, 2002) and is essential reading for scholars and practitioners concerned with issues of international responsibility, whether they arise in interstate relations, in the context of arbitration or litigation, or in bringing international claims.

‘You will never look at sand, food, phones, or concrete the same way after reading this book. A touching exploration of the dark underbelly of our modern world and how we can move beyond it.’ Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse ‘Crawford belongs with other storyteller-explorers — strolling player-writers like Iain Sinclair, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Macfarlane — who are stretching naturalist observation into incisive cultural inquiry ... Riveting.’ New York Review of Books A deeply reported journey into the scarred landscapes of global extraction — and a search for the path to repair. Humanity has remade the Earth with astonishing speed. In the last fifty years alone we have taken more out of the planet than in all prior history combined. Across every continent lie the immense wounds left behind by extraction: the mines, quarries, poisoned rivers, and hollowed-out towns that now form the true map of our civilisation and our age. Everything we touch — rock, metal, sand, water, even thought itself — feeds the reckless dream pursuit of limitless economic growth. Born into a family and landscape steeped in fossil fuels, James Crawford travels through the living ruins of extraction and meets the people living within its extremes: exploring the radioactive fertiliser-ziggurats of Florida’s Bone Valley, the lithium flats of the Atacama, Greenland’s collapsing melt-edge, the desertified shores of Spain’s Sea of Plastic, and the resource-hungry cloud centres birthing new artificial intelligences, to expose the true cost of this hollowed-out dream. Yet within these same landscapes lie radical alternatives. Hope emerges in the communities waging legal battles to leave oil untouched beneath the rainforests of Ecuador and the wildfire-stricken plains of Montana; technologists attempting to reverse extraction on Iceland’s tundra; and architects raising wooden skyscrapers amid Scandinavia’s felled forests — finding the path to repair for a world pushed to the brink. Incisive, immersive, and visionary, The Vanishing Earth exposes the ideological forces that have shaped the planet and charts the essential pathways that could yet save it.

From the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Take Four Books You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no plaques to explain their fading presence before you, nothing to account for what they once were – who made them, lived in them or abandoned them. Now they are merged with the landscape. They are being reclaimed by nature. They are wild history. In this book acclaimed author and presenter James Crawford introduces many such places all over the country, from the ruins of prehistoric forts and ancient, arcane burial sites, to abandoned bothies and boathouses, and the derelict traces of old, faded industry. Waterstones Scottish Book of the Month for April 2025 Shortlisted for The Great Outdoors Reader Awards Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize PRAISE FOR JAMES CRAWFORD The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World 'Crawford travels widely to make his points in a text reminiscent of those of Barry Lopez or Robert Macfarlane . . . A thoughtful consideration of the imaginary lines that hold meaning for so many' - Kirkus Reviews 'Crawford's essays, through vivid accounts of historical episodes and contemporary problems, illuminate how the world acquired its current shape . . . Eye-opening' - Literary Review Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings 'Conveys superbly these absorbing tales of hubris, power, violence and decay' - Sunday Times 'Witty and memorable . . . moving as well as myth-busting' - Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement Scotland from the Sky 'A stunning combination of aviation adventure and historical detective work' - Press and Journal 'Crawford is a genuine, risk-taking adventurer' - Daily Express

David Nobile is a handsome industrial mechanic in a world of sledgehammers and chain falls by day and a compassionate single dad of two young children by night. He learns his ideals of fatherhood by a popular song on the radio and desires to meet the heart behind the music.Riley Kragen is a beautiful aspiring singer/songwriter who is driven by an inner desire for an idyllic father figure she never knew. Meeting David, she is intrigued by his toughness and tenderness as he endeavors to help his children be the best they can be. She enters his world to find friendship and love.But this new romance is soon under attack by a jealous ex-wife whose selfish motives of bitterness and revenge threaten to shatter David's world, and take from him his only sources of love and happiness.Based in part on the author's own experiences, and set in the historic beauty of Charleston, SC, A Noble Paradise is a roller coaster ride of humor, wrath, ecstasy and despair, and a reaffirmation that eventually love wins over hate, good triumphs over evil, and that love, from a child or a woman, is a treasure worth fighting for.James Crawford is also the author of Mariner Valley and Seed of Aldebaran, as well as works in other genres.

Blending history, travel and reportage, this is a wide-ranging journey through the history of borders and an examination of their role in shaping our world today

From the presenter of BBC Radio 4's Take Four Books You scramble up over the dunes of an isolated beach. You climb to the summit of a lonely hill. You pick your way through the eerie hush of a forest. And then you find them. The traces of the past. Perhaps they are marked by a tiny symbol on your map, perhaps not. There are no plaques to explain their fading presence before you, nothing to account for what they once were – who made them, lived in them or abandoned them. Now they are merged with the landscape. They are being reclaimed by nature. They are wild history. In this book acclaimed author and presenter James Crawford introduces many such places all over the country, from the ruins of prehistoric forts and ancient, arcane burial sites, to abandoned bothies and boathouses, and the derelict traces of old, faded industry. Waterstones Scottish Book of the Month for April 2025 Shortlisted for The Great Outdoors Reader Awards Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize PRAISE FOR JAMES CRAWFORD The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World 'Crawford travels widely to make his points in a text reminiscent of those of Barry Lopez or Robert Macfarlane . . . A thoughtful consideration of the imaginary lines that hold meaning for so many' - Kirkus Reviews 'Crawford's essays, through vivid accounts of historical episodes and contemporary problems, illuminate how the world acquired its current shape . . . Eye-opening' - Literary Review Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings 'Conveys superbly these absorbing tales of hubris, power, violence and decay' - Sunday Times 'Witty and memorable . . . moving as well as myth-busting' - Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement Scotland from the Sky 'A stunning combination of aviation adventure and historical detective work' - Press and Journal 'Crawford is a genuine, risk-taking adventurer' - Daily Express

The Cocopa Dictionary serves as a vital resource in documenting and preserving the Cocopa language, a member of the Yuman family, spoken by communities in southwestern Arizona and northern Mexico. With a heritage rooted in the Colorado River delta region, this language connects its speakers to a rich history of cultural and environmental adaptation. Based on over 21 months of immersive fieldwork from 1963 to 1979, the dictionary captures the intricacies of Cocopa grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, offering a window into a language at risk of disappearing. This work synthesizes both firsthand data and historical records, providing a comprehensive linguistic resource that preserves the voices and knowledge of the Cocopa people for future generations. Designed for linguists, educators, and those invested in indigenous language preservation, the Cocopa Dictionary provides detailed grammatical analyses, including noun inflections, verb constructions, and sentence structures. It highlights the dynamic nature of the language, noting generational variations in speech patterns while addressing its synthetic and agglutinative morphology. In addition to linguistic data, the dictionary includes cultural insights, connecting words and expressions to their social and historical contexts. By meticulously recording the language's complexity and resilience, this work not only celebrates the Cocopa people's linguistic heritage but also serves as a critical tool for revitalization efforts, ensuring that this invaluable piece of human history endures. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

The Cocopa Dictionary serves as a vital resource in documenting and preserving the Cocopa language, a member of the Yuman family, spoken by communities in southwestern Arizona and northern Mexico. With a heritage rooted in the Colorado River delta region, this language connects its speakers to a rich history of cultural and environmental adaptation. Based on over 21 months of immersive fieldwork from 1963 to 1979, the dictionary captures the intricacies of Cocopa grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, offering a window into a language at risk of disappearing. This work synthesizes both firsthand data and historical records, providing a comprehensive linguistic resource that preserves the voices and knowledge of the Cocopa people for future generations. Designed for linguists, educators, and those invested in indigenous language preservation, the Cocopa Dictionary provides detailed grammatical analyses, including noun inflections, verb constructions, and sentence structures. It highlights the dynamic nature of the language, noting generational variations in speech patterns while addressing its synthetic and agglutinative morphology. In addition to linguistic data, the dictionary includes cultural insights, connecting words and expressions to their social and historical contexts. By meticulously recording the language's complexity and resilience, this work not only celebrates the Cocopa people's linguistic heritage but also serves as a critical tool for revitalization efforts, ensuring that this invaluable piece of human history endures. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Since the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the beginning of the next--a stone column inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform--borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout history and across the globe.What happens on the ground when we impose lines on a map that contradict how humans have always lived--and moved? Crawford confronts that question from bloody territorial disputes in Mesopotamia, to the S pmi lands of Scandinavia, the shifting boundaries of the Israel-Palestine conflict, efforts to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border, and the dangerous border crossings pursued by migrants into Europe.And yet the role of borders extends beyond specific sites of conflict. On the largest scale, borders define the limits of empire--the two walls in Britain that once represented the northwestern edge of the Roman Empire; the mythological eastern gate supposedly closed off by Alexander the Great; China's virtual "Great Firewall." On the smallest, human scale, cell walls are the last physical barrier against disease, after lines of quarantine have failed.Finally, as The Edge of the Plain reveals, humans have not only made their mark on the landscape: the landscape itself is now changing, more and more rapidly due to climate change. Crawford introduces us to both the Alpine watershed--one such shifting, natural borderline--and the "Great Green Wall" in Africa, envisioned as an international, community-built bulwark against desertification.Borders are as old as human civilization, and focal points for today's colliding forces of nationalism, climate change, globalization, and mass migration. The Edge of the Plain illuminates these lines of separation past and present, how we define them--and how they define us.

SHORTLISTED FOR SCOTLAND'S NATIONAL NON-FICTION BOOK AWARD 2023Today, there are more borders in the world than ever before in human history. In this book James Crawford argues that our enduring obsession with borders has brought us to a crisis point: that we are entering the endgame of a process that began thousands of years ago, when we first started dividing up the earth.Beginning with the earliest known marker which denoted the end of one land and the beginning of the next, Crawford follows the story of borders into our fragile and uncertain future - towards the virtual frontiers of the internet, and the shifting geography of a world beset by climate change. In the process, he travels to many borders old and new: from a melting border high in the glacial landscapes of the Austrian-Italian Alps to the only place on land where Europe and Africa meet; from the artist Banksy's 'Walled Off Hotel' in the conflict-torn West Bank to the Sonoran Desert and the fault lines of the US/Mexico border.Combining history, travel and reportage, The Edge of the Plain explores how borders have grown and evolved to take control of our landscapes, our memories, our identities and our destinies. As nationalism, climate change, globalisation, technology and mass migration all collide with ever-hardening borders, something has to give. And Crawford asks, is it time to let go of the lines that divide us?

Brownlie's Principles of Public International Law has been shaping the study and application of international law for over 50 years. Serving as a single-volume introduction to the field as a whole, the book is one of the classic treatises on international law, now fully updated to order to take account of recent developments. It includes extensive references in order to provide a solid foundation for further research. Authored by James Crawford, the ninth edition further secures the work as the essential international law text for students and practitioners.