Kirjahaku

Nineteenth-century France grew fascinated with the local past. Thousands of citizens embraced local archaeology, penned historical vignettes and monographs, staged historical pageants, and created museums and pantheons of celebrities. Stéphane Gerson's rich, elegantly written, and timely book provides the first cultural and political history of what contemporaries called the "cult of local memories," an unprecedented effort to resuscitate the past, instill affection for one's locality, and hence create a sense of place. A wide range of archival and printed sources (some of them untapped until now) inform the author's engaging portrait of a little-known realm of Parisian entrepreneurs and middling provincials, of obscure historians and intellectual luminaries. Arguing that the "local" and modernity were interlaced, rather than inimical, between the 1820s and 1890s, Gerson explores the diverse uses of local memories in modern France—from their theatricality and commercialization to their political and pedagogical applications. The Pride of Place shows that, contrary to our received ideas about French nationhood and centralism, the "local" buttressed the nation while seducing Parisian and local officials. The state cautiously supported the cult of local memories even as it sought to co-opt them and grappled with their cultural and political implications. The current enthusiasm for local memories, Gerson thus finds, is neither new nor a threat to Republican unity. More broadly yet, this book illuminates the predicament of countries that, like France, are now caught between supranational forces and a revival of local sentiments.

A haunting chronicle of what endures when the world we know is swept away On a day like any other, on a rafting trip down Utah s Green River, Stephane Gerson s eight-year-old son, Owen, drowned in a spot known as Disaster Falls. That night, as darkness fell, Stephane huddled in a tent with his wife, Alison, and their older son, Julian, trying to understand what seemed inconceivable. It s just the three of us now, Alison said over the sounds of a light rain and, nearby, the rushing river. We cannot do it alone. We have to stick together. Disaster Falls chronicles the aftermath of that day and their shared determination to stay true to Alison s resolution. At the heart of the book is an unflinching portrait of a marriage tested. Husband and wife grieve in radically different ways that threaten to isolate each of them in their post-Owen worlds. ( He feels so far, Stephane says when Alison shows him a selfie Owen had taken. He feels so close, she says.) With beautiful specificity, Stephane shows how they resist that isolation and reconfigure their marriage from within. As Stephane navigates his grief, the memoir expands to explore how society reacts to the death of a child. He depicts the good death of his father, which reveals an altogther different perspective on mortality. He excavates the history of the Green River rife with hazards not mentioned in the rafting company s brochures. He explores how stories can both memorialize and obscure a person s life and how they can rescue us. Disaster Falls is a powerful account of a life cleaved in two raw, truthful, and unexpectedly consoling."