Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost And Where Did It Go?

by Michael Bywater

They go. They vanish. People. Civilizations. Languages. Philosophies. Works of art disappear, species are extinguished, books are lost. Dunwich is drowned, Pompeii buried, Athena's statue gone from the Parthenon, Suetonius's Lives of the Great Whores gone the way of the Roman Empire. Whole libraries of knowledge, galleries of secrets. Gone. Little things, too. Train compartments. Snuff, galoshes, smog. Your mother's perfume. Our culture, our knowledge and all our lives are shadows cast by what went before. We are defined not by what we have but by what we have lost along the way. And so, Lost a glossary of the missing, a cabinet of absent curiosities, weaving a web of everything we no longer have. Lost the book the book that falls open at every page.

308 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 6, 2012

Reviews

[Peter Burton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual book dealing with the inevitable loss of everything so it becomes a random catalogue of the losses the author feels in his life and so in everyone’s life (at least British people).Full of little snippets written in a humorous style.Good to dip into and reminisce about life.