Trapped in the Present Tense: Meditations on American Memory

Brooks (In the City), a literature professor at the New School, investigates the “cultural obsolescence” of “the act of remembering” in this impressionistic and vague consideration. It’s broken into five sections: shooters, soldiers, secrets, statistics, and snapshots. Brooks first takes on gun violence, which she writes saturates American culture, examining the 1966 shootings at the University of Texas, Austin, back further to Kennedy’s assassination, through the television news coverage of the Vietnam War, and then forward to the contemporary prevalence of mass shootings (including a somewhat unnerving side journey into the life of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza’s mother). She next addresses the “vicarious warrior culture in which most of us just watch from afar” and chronicles the pervasiveness of military language, thanks in part to the arrival of the nuclear age. In “Statistics” she writes that “the market for data-driven decisions has exploded,” and that “every statistic can be unpacked so that the story at its heart emerges, like a lost language one has to relearn.” In the final chapter, Brooks muses on photography’s ability to capture reality and the past: “Most of the time we hardly notice, but it’s striking how quickly the past becomes an abstraction.” While the questions Brooks asks are urgent, her answers often feel cryptic and meandering. The idea has potential, but it’s not quite realized. (Jan.)