The Fabrication of Virtue

By Robin Evans,

Book cover of The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840

Book description

First published in 1982, this book describes a new kind of prison architecture that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book concentrates on architecture, but places it in the context of contemporary penal practice and contemporary thought. Beginning with an exploration on the eighteenth-century prisons before…

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1 author picked The Fabrication of Virtue as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Many of Howard’s prescriptions for prison reform focused on the physical plant. His favorite prison architect, William Blackburn, translated Howard’s reform principles into brick and mortar.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” presented a far different and more insidious vision of a circular prison in which each inmate was under the constant surveillance of a guard posted in a central viewing station.

Robin Evans’s gorgeous photographs of the centuries-old remnants of this wave of prison building and prison reform embellish the story told by Howard and Ignatieff.

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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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