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In the Memory House
In the Memory House recalls what American society has forgotten--the land, its people, and its ideals. By examining what we choose to remember, this important book reveals how progress has created absences in our landscapes and in our lives.
- GenresNonfiction
288 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1993
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52 people want to read
About the author
Howard Mansfield
34 books38 followersHoward Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation as he seeks to understand the soul of American places. He is the author of a dozen books about the stories we tell each other and the ones we refuse to tell. In short, how we chose our ancestors
He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place… But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”
Among his other books are Turn & Jump, The Bones of the Earth and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”
“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”
His newest book to be published in October is Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. It's about the memorials we debate, dedicate, and then ignore.
We live in an era of monument building. Our monuments, often after fierce debate, are dedicated in ceremonies that try to bring life to the stone -- and then we walk away. The mute stones are left to the pigeons. Our grandest efforts at creating a shared, cultural memory melt to invisibility. Why?
Invisible Monuments looks at these moments of commemoration in the familiar and the unfamiliar. We visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Bunker Hill Monument, and a once- venerated World War I memorial in England. We journey to a little-known memorial that one grief-stricken family built stone-by-stone for their son lost in war, a place that still draws thousands each year.
And Invisible Monuments looks at the failure to commemorate in the recently rediscovered African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and in the unmarked graves of the Irish immigrants who built the railroads in the woods of New Hampshire. We’re also introduced to an audacious attempt to memorialize the future by building a clock deep in a mountain that is designed to run for 10,000 years.
These memorials are attempts to bring us closer to our ancestors, to say that we are still joined hand-to-hand across the centuries. In Vietnam, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, there are two burials. The first to return the body to the earth, and then the second, when the bones are dug up and brought closer to the village. We do the same.
When we commission memorials, we are trying to bring the bones closer to home. The memorials we build are a second burial. In all the current controversies about what to build and how, and what to tear down, we’ve lost track of why we build monuments. We want the counsel of our ancestors – edited, and chiseled into stone.
Invisible Monuments is about tribute, memory, and the summoning of the past.
Howard Mansfield has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Heritage, The Threepenny Review, and other publications.
He has served as a writer and consultant for museums, written and performed a stage show with composer Ben Cosgrove that was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film, and he has co-written a documentary film about “The Old Homestead: The Play of the Century.”
He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place… But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”
Among his other books are Turn & Jump, The Bones of the Earth and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”
“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”
His newest book to be published in October is Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past. It's about the memorials we debate, dedicate, and then ignore.
We live in an era of monument building. Our monuments, often after fierce debate, are dedicated in ceremonies that try to bring life to the stone -- and then we walk away. The mute stones are left to the pigeons. Our grandest efforts at creating a shared, cultural memory melt to invisibility. Why?
Invisible Monuments looks at these moments of commemoration in the familiar and the unfamiliar. We visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Bunker Hill Monument, and a once- venerated World War I memorial in England. We journey to a little-known memorial that one grief-stricken family built stone-by-stone for their son lost in war, a place that still draws thousands each year.
And Invisible Monuments looks at the failure to commemorate in the recently rediscovered African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and in the unmarked graves of the Irish immigrants who built the railroads in the woods of New Hampshire. We’re also introduced to an audacious attempt to memorialize the future by building a clock deep in a mountain that is designed to run for 10,000 years.
These memorials are attempts to bring us closer to our ancestors, to say that we are still joined hand-to-hand across the centuries. In Vietnam, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, there are two burials. The first to return the body to the earth, and then the second, when the bones are dug up and brought closer to the village. We do the same.
When we commission memorials, we are trying to bring the bones closer to home. The memorials we build are a second burial. In all the current controversies about what to build and how, and what to tear down, we’ve lost track of why we build monuments. We want the counsel of our ancestors – edited, and chiseled into stone.
Invisible Monuments is about tribute, memory, and the summoning of the past.
Howard Mansfield has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Heritage, The Threepenny Review, and other publications.
He has served as a writer and consultant for museums, written and performed a stage show with composer Ben Cosgrove that was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film, and he has co-written a documentary film about “The Old Homestead: The Play of the Century.”
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 8, 2015
This book is hard to describe--it's not like any I've ever read before. Part philosophy, part retrospective, part history. If pressed to sum it up succinctly, I'd say it's a book about nostalgia, through the lens of New England. Each chapter is essentially a stand-alone essay within this overarching theme, and oddly the essays range from incredibly interesting to tediously boring. Thus my overall score of three stars. The author definitely has a tendency to ramble on in certain chapters, almost in a stream-of-consciousness writing style. I wasn't a big fan of those parts. But I'm glad I read this very different book. I'd perhaps more accurately give it 3.5 stars for readers interested in or familiar with New England, and 2.5 stars for those who aren't.
May 17, 2017
Mansfield's rumination on how New England remembers it's past considers how ancestors is chosen, who is included in a communities remembrance, and what becomes absent in our landscapes and consciousness. The author uses the metaphor of what he calls "Memory Houses," structures to hold emotive collections and the stories they can tell, as a narrative thread in his analysis of New England culture. The objects collected has emotional resonance for the collector, and the meanings and resonances change or are forgotten. This book wasn't quite what I had expected, but was both interesting, enjoyable, and an unsentimental examination of cultural memory.
July 21, 2009
Reading this for the library book group.
March 20, 2011
Love Mansfield's thoughtful take on memory and touchstones to the past. Featured on my blog here:
http://myowntimemachine.wordpress.com...
http://myowntimemachine.wordpress.com...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews