UMass professor Max Page will read & discuss his new book, The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction. A real “Page turner!”
This earth-shattering event will take place on Tuesday, January 6, 2008 at 7:30 PM at the Old Firehouse (7 Sugarloaf St.) in South Deerfield Center. It is co-sponsored by the Jewish Historical Society of Western Massachusetts & Schoen Books.
Why have Americans repeatedly had destruction fantasies of New York? Fires raging through the city in 19th-century paintings! Manhattan engulfed by a gigantic wave in the 1998 movie Deep Impact! Played out in virtually every form of literature and art, what do these fantasies mean? This book is the first to investigate two centuries of imagined cataclysms visited upon New York City, and to provide a critical historical perspective to our understanding of the events of September 11, 2001.
Page demonstrates with vivid examples and illustrations how each era’s destruction genre has reflected the city’s economic, political, or racial tensions, and he also shows how the images have become forces in their own right, shaping Americans’ perceptions of New York and of all cities.
Max Page is associate professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a 2003 Guggenheim Fellow and author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, which received the 2001 Spiro Kostof Award of the Society of Architectural Historians. He lives in Amherst.
The book will be available for sale. Refreshments served. NO snow date!
Parking available in front, at bank next door, and in the public parking lot in town center.