Eviatar Zerubavel

I found this interesting, as a layperson whose function in many social situations often seems to be the person saying, "hey, cool elephant; where'd you get it?" with all of the attendant fallout.

Or, in many cases, non-fallout, because the wish not to acknowledge the elephant most certainly extends to comments about the elephant, so for example:

Me: Hey, cool elephant; where'd you get it?
Them: I've often wanted to visit India.

Me: That's neat, but isn't it hard to enjoy the new TV with the show more elephant in the way?
Them: My favourite show right now is Scandal. It has great reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Anyway. I enjoyed the book. My one caveat is the author's frankly bigoted commentary at some points. Examples:

Calling Jefferson's treatment of his slave Sally Hemings an "illicit relationship."
Stating that Bill Cosby was called out by the black community for his commentary on black youth for being too truthful, rather than for being a racist pack of lies.

Two examples of several, not all of which I can remember. Such bigotry makes this book itself part of ongoing conspiracies of silence on matters other than those he discusses, ironically, and I can't help but notice that other reviewers have failed to mention them. What is it called when book reviewers engage in a conspiracy of silence to let pass the conspiracy of silence perpetuated by the author of a book about conspiracies of silence? show less

All in all, this is a very short book (barely 110 pages of text, the rest are notes and bibliography), but Zerubavel has packed a lot into it. His approach is ambitious, he wants to show "how the past is registered and organized in our minds". Perhaps that's too ambitious, because his conclusion is actually the same as his starting point, namely that our view of the past is socially determined and uses narrative structures and approaches that are embedded in the community in which we live. show more

And of course it is. But Zerubavel succeeds in making that theoretical view very illustrative through an apprehensive overview of approaches and techniques of looking at the past, accompanied by a cartload of concrete examples from almost all over the world. In this sense, this work is closely related to that of David Lowenthal. The Past is a Foreign Country - Revisited, which is much more exhaustive and goes even wider, but then again lacks a clear structure; in that sense the two complement each other well.
See my more elaborate review in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... (less) show less

Brief, readable book about the ideology of historical narratives and timekeeping systems (i.e., the calendar). I'm no stranger to the ideological dimension of the quotidian, so the revelations on hand here didn't feel especially startling, but having so many examples so accessibly presented kept the book enjoyable.

A decent, if somewhat lightweight, look at denial in American life and culture. The author spends all too much time on issues like sex (especially presidential sex) which is really no ones business to know about anyway, and all too little time on the real denial issues that are creating serious problems. Denial of reality in the face of global warming, for instance. He doesn't really talk about that sort of denial much, instead focusing mostly on denial of family issues; those are certainly show more important, but this book was so short there was definitely room for a great deal more meat. He did find some great quotes to start his chapters, and he utilized pop references well, so they fit smoothly into the text, and didn't look like he was trying to be "hip". Overall, a good start on an important topic, but it will almost certainly leave you wanting more. show less