Against Remembrance

(Paperback)

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In this searing and controversial polemic, esteemed American journalist David Rieff argues against our passion for the past. He looks at how memory serves nationalistic history every ANZAC Day and annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli, and at its worst, how memory of past horrors inflame deep-seated ethnic hatreds, violence and wars. The slaughter Rieff witnessed in Bosnia forever poisoned the idea of remembrance for him. This book, he writes, is a product of that alarm.

Author Bio

David Rieff is the author of eight books, including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West and A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. His memoir of his mother Susan Sontag's final illness Swimming in a Sea of Death, was published in January 2008.