“This book is akin to a casting of fictional characters. What they have in common is that they recognized their obsession through their encounter with a besieged city. Choose from this sad gallery the uniform or traits that best suit you. You are now free to roam the ruins. Albert Speer, Naram-Sîn of Akkad, Scipio Aemilianus, Irma Schrader, Shang Yang, Stig Dagerman, Shapur I, Bernardo Bellotto… Through portraits of victors, the vanquished, or mere witnesses, this book tells the story of the world in the form of a single panorama of collapsed cities, from Mesopotamia before writing to Ground Zero after September 11. Between scholarly digression and dreamlike narration, Jean-Yves Jouannais constructs, on the rubble of our memory, an inventory that is both fanciful and reasoned, of the worst war traumas.”