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    Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey
    Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey
    Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey
    Ebook298 pages5 hours

    Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey

    By James Attlee

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Through the centuries, people from all walks of life have heard the siren call of a pilgrimage, the lure to journey away from the familiar in search of understanding. But is a pilgrimage even possible these days for city-dwellers enmeshed in the pressures of work and family life? Or is there a way to be a pilgrim without leaving one’s life behind? James Attlee answers these questions with Isolarion, a thoughtful, streetwise, and personal account of his pilgrimage to a place he thought he already knew—the Cowley Road in Oxford, right outside his door.

    Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s what Attlee, sharp-eyed and armed with tape recorder and notebook, provides for Cowley Road. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist’s or student’s Oxford. What Attlee presents instead is a thoroughly modern, impressively cosmopolitan, and utterly organic collection of shops, restaurants, pubs, and religious establishments teeming with life and reflecting the multicultural makeup of the surrounding neighborhood.

    From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and reggae clubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. But the very diversity that is, for Attlee, the essence of Cowley Road’s appeal is under attack from well-meaning city planners and predatory developers. His pilgrimage is thus invested with melancholy: will the messy glories of the Cowley Road be lost to creeping homogenization?

    Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and companionable guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. Isolarion is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2008
    ISBN9780226030951
    Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey
    Author

    James Attlee

    James Attlee worked in art publishing for 25 years and then as editor-at-large for Chicago University Press. He is the author of the acclaimed Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey; Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight; and Station to Station.

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    Reviews for Isolarion

    3.5/5

    17 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The thing that always seems to be missing from travelogues is the map. The map that shows important cross-roads and historical markers. The one that allows the reader to feel that there is some shared context with the speaker of the pieces, even if removed by 90 degrees.I am learning, slowly, that the absence of a visual reference is entirely deliberate and ought to tell me, the reader, something: this is not a guide book, it is a record of experience.James Atlee's record of his experience exploring Oxford, East Oxford in particular is a very thoughtful record of experiences that show how a deeper level of interaction with an area can create a stronger sense of community and a willingness to express oneself in aid of that community, instead of in aid of one's own ego.There are shopkeepers and bicyclists and the occasional drunk. Children appear and run through sections as they would through rooms in their own homes, and family is gathered time and again for communion of different sorts and in different dress, all with the same end: this is what we do as humans in this very specific place.I read it as an eBook, and would be very happy to have a physical copy. It is the sort of book that invites random perusal, sans agenda or hope of new discovery. The writing does not pander to any one group of people, and the speaker does not self-aggrandize even though he refers to himself in the first person and is very straightforward about his motives in tangent or digression or response.Apparently, there are a few books in the world whose center is East Oxford - the speaker finds this comforting after a while. Understanding his reticence to come face to face with perceived competition, I appreciate his eventual embrace of the work of others, and find it motivating.A good and thoughtful and brave book. Idealism in a world of apathy. On a bicycle, to boot.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book very much. It's an exploration of the past and present of an area of East Oxford that has been neglected in comparison to its more famous neighbour. It's a study in multiculturalism, urban art and landscaping, and human interaction with our environment over the centuries. In some ways the book is more of a meander than the pilgrimage Attlee promises us at the beginning, but that's OK - it's a fascinating journey, nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      Initially thought it was a bit too annoyingly literary - done by someone too in love with words - but it settled down and I enjoyed it a lot. It's written in small sections that will appeal to Oxford residents and to those who don't know Oxford alike: if you don't know Oxford you will take it as a series of pieces on modern life as illustrated by a modern city, and if you do know it then it will take on an added dimension as it reveals new things about even well-known places.
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