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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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ON NOSTALGIA

David Berry

From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it.
Nostalgia is all the rage. From movies to music to politics, this ceaseless looking backward is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has become a quintessentially modern condition.

Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostal- gia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down.

Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than it ever has been.

David Berry is a writer and cultural critic in Edmonton. His work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, Toronto Life, and elsewhere, and he was an arts and culture columnist for the National Post for five years. This is his first book.
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Published 2020-05-28 by Coach House Books

Comments

Nostalgia becomes the ultimate reaction to the modern world, which is alienating, and we don't know who we are. We're trying to define ourselves. Read more...

Berry guides us toward a deeper knowledge of ourselves and the ways we stitch our past into our present and future, not only to remember what we once were but to reinvent ourselves - to persist and exist. Read more...

In many ways, nostalgia is like trusting a gut feeling. We must first be aware of it, pay attention to it, and listen when it reaches out to tell us things, but not get sucked into a vortex and misdirect its teachings into torment. Read more...

It's frightening to sit with the fact of our memory's fallibility when so much of our identity is culled from our past. But Berry concludes that even though this can make us seem untethered, it's also comforting, because "however broken and absurd our way of getting through the world is, it's worked up until now. Read more...

If you want to understand how nostalgia morphed from literal homesickness into something that is more akin to timesickness, and how the pull of the past is both a malady and a balm, Berry's book is worth reading... Read more...

On Nostalgia is a powerful, thought-provoking work of philosophy and closely-argued systemic analysis. While the book is slim, Berry's writing is thick, complex and layered, but leavened with a sly wit. Read more...