The Vanishing Map: A Journey from La to Tokyo to the Heart of Europe (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781845205102)

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.

Author: Stephen Barber
ISBN-10: 1845205103
ISBN-13: 9781845205102
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Language: English
Published: 10/01/2006
Pages: 160
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.61lbs
Size: 7.74h x 5.62w x 0.75d