Bøger af Barbara Hodgson

Those who wish to understand a city's history visit museums, but Barbara Hodgson prefers a different approach. She explores the streets, bookstores, and markets, where a city reveals its most private self, displaying the contents of its attics and trash bins. Back alleys, obscure cemeteries, and hidden courtyards also offer up surprising finds and capture the essence of the city. Covering a wide cultural and physical geography from Brussels to Marrakech and Damascus to Portland, "Trading in Memories" follows Barbara Hodgson's travels through markets and other repositories of material culture around the world. The book looks deep into history through such objects as chandeliers left by French expatriates fleeing Shanghai in 1937 and glass lantern slides and stereoscope cards from around the world that attest to the human impulse for wanderlust, free or forced. This sumptuous book presents a wonderful visual and textual record of the true life and character of a place.

Opium was first used in a surprising venue - religious ceremonies - but soon passed into common usage as a cure for various ailments during Victorian times; a resonant symbol of the romantic, dissolute East; and an inducer of fever dreams and worse in those who failed to resist its lure. This beautifully designed book captures the heady essence of opium history and culture. Drawing on memoirs, science, and travel books, Opium traces the changing image of the drug through artifacts and apparatus of its use; illustrations of opium dens in Hong Kong, New York, San Francisco, Toulon, and Canton; portraits of drug-taking writers, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Théophile Gautier, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and Graham Greene; lurid covers of 19th-century illustrated newspapers and 20th-century pulp-fiction drug titles; and stills from drug-related films that resonate with opium's insidious, enduring allure.