Lyssna fritt i 30 dagar! In featuring monumental gems, archaeologist Ball provides a synoptic account of Afghan history that proves accessible and insightful. Ball has furnished a valuable addition to scholarship on Afghanistan.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels from undergraduates to professional specialists. Warwick Ball knows Afghanistan better than anyone else I know; he writes well, accessibly and accurately. Not only does he offer his readers a trustworthy and scholarly account, but his already authoritative text is richly augmented by superb colour photographs.
Ball covers the entire country and poignantly reveals many sites that have now vanished or been destroyed. The Monuments of Afghanistan is a complete survey of this remarkable land and its legacy. It will delight scholars while also making a sumptious addition to the library of the generalist. Since remote antiquity it has been a cradle and cross-roads of many civilisations of the Old World. No one knows the region better than Warwick Ball, who has long travelled, studied and excavated there.
His account of the country, its history and monuments, is as dramatic as the land itself, and makes compulsive reading. The book is also a visual feast, given the stunning photographs - largely the author's own - which augment the text though this is not just another picture book. The land has, over millennia, focussed the attention of Great Powers Persians, Greeks, British and Russians in the Great Game and religions, but in the end it transcends them all.
Ball brings Afghanistan to us as brilliantly and sympathetically as it deserves. In his latest book, he describes the most important sites in the gazetteer and illustrates them with his stunning photographs. I visited many of these sites 25 years ago, and read The Monuments of Afghanistan with a mixture of nostalgia and reassurance - reassurance that, despite destruction and loss, much of the monumental heritage of this remote and beautiful country has survived the upheavals of recent years.
