The Future of the Past

Alexander Stille

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A fascinating tour of the past as it exists today, and of the dangers that threaten it, through incisive portraits of our attempts to maintain it: the high-tech struggles to save the Great Sphinx and the Ganges; the efforts to preserve Latin within the Vatican; the digital glut inside the National Archives, which may have caused more information to be lost than ever before; and an oral culture threatened by a "new" technology: writing itself. Stille explores not simply the past, but our ideas about the past--and how they will have to change if our past is to have a future.

Book Details

Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
Publish Date: Apr 1st, 2003
Pages: 368
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.50in - 5.50in - 0.90in - 1.10lb
EAN: 9780312420949
Categories: • Social History• Technology Studies• Asia - China

About the Author

Stille, Alexander: - Alexander Stille is the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism; Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic; The Future of the Past; The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi; and The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University and lives in New York.

More books by Alexander Stille

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Praise for this book

"An exhilaratingly panoramic, inescapably poignant snapshot of a world poised in a Janus moment, where technology is both bane and savior of the past and present." --Newsday (New York)

"A smart and engaging work...[by] a clean, clear writer... His ideas are anchored in the tangible and...you can take your pick of the strong essays in The Future of the Past." --The New York Times Book Review

"This book is worth reading for its chapter on the Sphinx alone." --Harper's Magazine

"Illuminating and engrossing...a fresh, lively, and ultimately wrenching display of a world transforming itself irrevocably." --The New York Observer

"Fascinating...deftly written, keenly observed." --The New York Times