Trapped In the Present Tense
Meditations on American Memory
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
For readers of Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Odell, this poetic and inventive blend of history, memoir, and visual essay reflects on how we can resist the erasure of our collective memory in this American century.
Our sense of our history requires us to recall the details of time, of experiences that help us find our place in the world together and encourage us in the search for our individual identities. When we lose sight of the past, our ability to see ourselves and to understand one another is diminished.
In this book, Colette Brooks explores how some of the more forgotten aspects of recent American experiences explain our challenging and often puzzling present. Through intimate and meticulously researched retellings of individual stories of violence, misfortune, chaos, and persistence—from the first mass shooting in America from the tower at the University of Texas, the televised assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, life with nuclear bombs and the Doomsday Clock, obsessive diarists and round-the-clock surveillance, to pandemics and COVID-19—Brooks is able to reframe our country’s narratives with new insight to create a prismatic account of how efforts to reclaim the past can be redemptive, freeing us from the tyranny of the present moment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brooks (In the City), a literature professor at the New School, investigates the "cultural obsolescence" of "the act of remembering" in this impressionistic and vague consideration. It's broken into five sections: shooters, soldiers, secrets, statistics, and snapshots. Brooks first takes on gun violence, which she writes saturates American culture, examining the 1966 shootings at the University of Texas, Austin, back further to Kennedy's assassination, through the television news coverage of the Vietnam War, and then forward to the contemporary prevalence of mass shootings (including a somewhat unnerving side journey into the life of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza's mother). She next addresses the "vicarious warrior culture in which most of us just watch from afar" and chronicles the pervasiveness of military language, thanks in part to the arrival of the nuclear age. In "Statistics" she writes that "the market for data-driven decisions has exploded," and that "every statistic can be unpacked so that the story at its heart emerges, like a lost language one has to relearn." In the final chapter, Brooks muses on photography's ability to capture reality and the past: "Most of the time we hardly notice, but it's striking how quickly the past becomes an abstraction." While the questions Brooks asks are urgent, her answers often feel cryptic and meandering. The idea has potential, but it's not quite realized.
