The Future of the Past FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Space radar, infrared photography, carbon dating, DNA analysis, microfilm, digital databases - we have better technology than ever before for studying and preserving the past. And yet the by-products of technology threaten to destroy - in one or two generations - monuments, works of art, and ways of life that have survived thousands of years of hardship and war. This paradox is central to our age. We can access infinite amounts of information on the internet, but the historical context of it all is escaping us. Globalization may eventually benefit countries around the world; it will also, almost certainly, lead to the disappearance of hundreds of regional dialects, languages, and whole societies." In The Future of the Past, Alexander Stille takes us on a tour of the past as it exists today and weighs its prospects for tomorrow, from China to Somalia to Washington, D.C. Through incisive portraits of their protagonists, he describes high-tech struggles to save the Great Sphinx and the Ganges; efforts to preserve Latin within the Vatican; the digital glut inside the National Archives, which may have lost more information in the information age than ever before; and an oral culture threatened by a "new" technology: writing itself. Wherever it takes him, Stille explores not just the past but also our ideas about the past: how they are changing - and how they will have to change if our past is to have a future.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
The Great Sphinx of Giza, "part lion, part pharaoh, part god," is slowly dying. Large chunks of limestone crack off each day, the soft middle portion of its body is vulnerable and, eventually, the head will become unstable. Though Egyptologists try to restore and preserve the great monument, much of their work does more harm than good. In the disturbing words of one archeologist: "You study it, you kill it." That comment best captures the paradox at the heart of Stille's splendid book: scholars work feverishly to study and preserve precious monuments, rare species and ancient manuscripts, relying on ever more advanced forms of technology in their efforts, while the accelerating rate of technological change industrialization, population growth and pollution threatens to destroy these treasures. Hence, a cycle of preservation and destruction perpetuates itself. Stille (Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic), a lovely storyteller, brings to life the passionate and forceful personalities of preservationists, dedicated scholars, bald opportunists, looters and other key players in the world of conservation and preservation. He examines the dying traditions of canoe making and oral poetry on an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea; the tombaroli (tomb robbers) of Sicily who have helped to make illicit antiquities the third most valued item in the world's black markets; devastating levels of pollution in the beloved and holy Ganges river; and one man's ultimately scandalous attempt to modernize the 550-year-old Vatican library. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker (where parts of this book were previously published), Stille consistently offers a powerful narrative, rich with anecdote, detailed description and lively dialogue. This is a must read for anyone interested in the preservation of our world's decaying treasures. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
A writer living in New York who often takes up Italian subjects, Stille here ponders the double-edged impact of technological change on physical and literary artifacts of the human past. He focuses on some specific places, among them Egypt, China, Sicily, India, and Madagascar. He also deals with the technology of writing and the libraries of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the present. Some of the chapters have been published separately. There is no index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Kirkus Reviews
On deteriorating masterpieces, disintegrating temples, declining Latin, and other markers of the race to save history from humanity. "Our society is in the midst of a fundamental rupture with the past," writes New Yorker contributor Stille (Excellent Cadavers, 1995, etc.). This break, he adds, isn't a result just of the historical amnesia born of a television age but is also a result of disappearing antiquities themselves: our knowledge of the past, of earlier peoples, and even of nature increases exponentially while the objects of study themselves are disappearing, whether to the tomb, the robber's shovel, or Taliban cannons. Stille's 11 pieces here, most previously published in the New Yorker, address this loss while looking at varied attempts by individuals (and by a few organizations) to reverse it. The author writes, for example, about American primatologist Patricia Wright, who, "great at politicking," all but single-handedly created Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park, a preserve for lemurs and other endangered species; about University of Chicago scholar Mark Lehner, who is laboring against all odds to prevent further destruction of Egypt's Giza pyramid complex; and, most entertaining of all, about the American expatriate priest Reginald Foster, who has launched a highly influential if idiosyncratic movement to restore Latin to the status of a living language. Individually, the pieces are pleasures, bearing all the hallmarks of New Yorker-style comprehensive yet accessible approach to the weightiest of matters. But they're not equally successful at adding up to a sustained argument, a weakness revealed clearly in the ill-advised concluding chapter, which attempts to tie it alltogether with a string of truisms about the deleterious effects of modern habits on things and ways of the past. Even so, Stille is an exemplary reporter, and he offers here just the thing to add to a history buff's stack of bedside reading.
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