Product Description

"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 just what James Attlee does here for Cowley Road in Oxford. 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.From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, the sharp-eyed Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road's appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and nightclubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards.Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy" to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and congenial 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #324761 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 296 pages

Review
"A gem....James Attlee's scholarly, reflective and sympathetic journey up the Cowley Road... blends a vivid account of daily life, fluid and unsettling, in a modern British town with powerful allegorical reflections on the connections between past and present, time and space, and high culture and the hard scrabble world that sustains it." - Economist "The attraction, for Attlee, is that the Cowley Road 'is both unique and nothing special'; the resulting book is unique and very special.... Residents of East Oxford can be proud to have this eccentric advocate and eloquent explorer in their midst." - Geoff Dyer, Guardian "James Attlee grabs our hand and drags us down Cowley Road in Oxford, determined to prove that it is not a stuffy, medieval, Masterpiece Theatre town. All the messy glories of Cowley Road - pubs and porn shops alike - come to life in this work, which becomes a meditation on home and the nature of pilgrimage." - National Geographic Traveler "The fish-out-of water travelogue is a staple of the bookstore, but James Attlee... has set himself a different task: to be the fish, and to give a detailed description of the properties of the water.... Attlee's reading is deep and wide and engagingly circuitous, and this book frequently provides the delights of discovery that make any adventure worth undertaking." - Rebecca Mead, Bookforum "Attlee paints an iridescent picture of a new Oxford that no guide book has yet captured." - Richard B. Woodward, New York Times"

National Geographic Traveler
"Attlee grabs our hand and drags us down Cowley Road in Oxford, determined to prove that it is not a stuffy,
medieval, Masterpiece Theatre town. All the messy glories of Cowley Road-pubs and porn shops alike-come to life in this work, which becomes a meditation on home and the nature of pilgrimage."

Isabel Berwick, Financial Times
"In this offbeat, personal exploration of his city, James Attlee takes not only the historic colleges but the prosaic Cowley Road in east Oxford as his chosen map. . . . Isolarion, despite its title, is about engagement. Attlee shows the hidden beauty of the plural society: ''To put it simply, this is what I love about the moment in history I inhabit.'"

Customer Reviews

Travelling, but not far
From time to time one sees a book of a type for which there is no convenient classification. This is an example, a "place" book but not a "travel" book. In it, James Attlee explores Cowley Road in Oxford - a part of the city that visitors don't usually reach, but a vibrant and interesting one.

In a journey along and around the road, Attlee muses on the past, present and future, what has changed and what continues, while engaged with other residents in a struggle to stop proposed improvements from spreading blandness along it.

This is an excellent read, a book that made me, an occasional traveller along Cowley Road, consider my own response to it. It embodies a very clear sense of place. Overall, the sort of book one regrets coming to the end of.

Brilliant Book
The idea is brilliant - "Why go and see the world when it has come to you" - in other words see the world by looking at your local high street - in this case in Oxford

One of the best books I've reads in the last 10 years