The Vanishing Map: A Journey from L.A. to Tokyo to the Heart of Europe

by Stephen Barber

Stephen Barber takes the reader on an extraordinary journey from LA to Tokyo via Europe. He carries only a crumpled map in his pocket, a map that plots a horrifying past, a disappearing present and a future collapsing into banality. A virtual reality flight across this territory reveals the surfaces of things, a landscape made by war and technological advances. Coming back to earth and to his own body, Stephen Barber follows the map from city to city. He discovers how cities, once densely layered with a civilization's history of follies and obsessions, are increasingly oblivious places, accelerating the erasure of their own histories, forgetting themselves. Barber's journey becomes a profound meditation on the future of the city and the role of memory in our lives.Dazzlingly written, erudite and, by turns funny, elegiac and horrific, The Vanishing Map explores what cities were, are and will be. Deeper than this, it questions how memory - personal, urban, national and global memory - can survive.

Genres: Travel

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 3, 2006

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A physically small book that I thought I could polish off on a short plane ride -- wrong! Barber has a very sophisticated style; intellectual, but not so dense as to be a turn-off.
Title is a tad misleading: " 'via' the Heart of Europe" would be more accurate, since the book opens with a prelude in L.A. before heading to Central Europe, where most of the travel narrative is set, and then finishing up in Japan.