The Future Of the Past

Stille, Alexander; Alexander Stille

ISBN 10: 0312420943 / ISBN 13: 9780312420949

Published by Picador/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2003

About this Item

339 pp. An excellent study/work/research/reading copy! Solidly and tightly bound copy with moderate external wear and use. Pen and pencil markings plus marginalia throughout text. Smooth covers. Moderate discoloration/browning/tanning or foxing on page edges, not affecting text. Mutiple pages previously dog-eared. Mildly or minimally shelf worn.

Seller Inventory # 1FislCd0062

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Future Of the Past
• Publisher: Picador/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312420943
• ISBN 13: 9780312420949
• Binding: Trade Paperback
• Illustrator: Dean Nicastro (Cover Design); Enrico Ferorelli (Author Photo); 'Secret of the Sphinx, 1984 by Mark Tansey/Gagosian Gallery (Cover Painting)
• Edition: 1st Picador Edition: April 2003
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.