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Climate change, civil unrest, wars: How will we make it through the tough times looming before us? By remembering, Mary Soderstrom argues. Ours is not the first time in history when catastrophe has threatened societies, and using examples from China, the Roman Empire, and North American Indigenous cultures, Soderstrom shows how memory can lead the way toward the future. She begins by examining how memory works and then details how we store our collective memories in libraries and archives, as well as in the vastness of the digital universe.
In part an entertaining history of knowledge and where we keep it, Before We Forget allays fears and encourages people to develop strategies for safeguarding collective and individual wisdom, which we will need to meet the challenges ahead.
Since classical times at least, people have built Memory Palaces – imaginary mansions with infinite rooms where they learn to store and retrieve vast treasures of memory. In Before We Forget, Mary Soderstrom becomes a memory palace herself. Sensing the societal collapse that looms, she explores scores of ways to explore what memory is, how civilizational knowledge has been lost and retrieved through the centuries, and what things small and large we each can do to strengthen and preserve memory against tides of forgetting. Supporting your local library is one place to start.
Before We Forget is a layered exploration of how individual and collective memories can help us understand and leverage the past to confront current and future challenges. By weaving personal narratives with science and history, Mary Soderstrom outlines the myriad ways that memory and perception impact how we understand ourselves and the wider world. The author's exploration of how individuals and memory institutions are vital in the transmission and preservation of community stories is timely and provides important insight into how memories can be safeguarded and shared into the future.
Throughout, Soderstrom interweaves fascinating tidbits from science and history, as well as reflections on her own life, which offer a thematic throughline and a welcome emotional depth.
- Preface: Why Memory Is Important
- Part 1: Memories Are Made of This
- 1 What Is Memory And How Did George Do It?
- 2 Memory Is the Highway of Life
- 3 Where We Keep Our Memories: Libraries and Other Places
- 4 Cyber Memories
- 5 When Memory Departs: Dementia, Gaslighting, and Cultural Extinction
- Part 2: Three Cases of Forgetting ... and Recovery
- 6 China: A History of Forgetting and Remembering
- 7 Rome: Memory Lost but the Heritage Lasts
- 8 The Indigenous Peoples of North America: A Tale of Loss and Recovery
- Part 3: The Future of Remembering
- 9 The Gathering Darkness and What to Do About It
- 10 The Things to Carry
- Afterword: Of Time and the River Flowing