The Guardian of All Things
The Epic Story of Human Memory
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating exploration of the history of memory and human civilization
Memory makes us human. No other animal carries in its brain so many memories of such complexity nor so regularly revisits those memories for happiness, safety, and the accomplishment of complex tasks. Human civilization continues because we are able to pass along memories from one person to another, from one generation to the next.
The Guardian of All Things is a sweeping scientific history that takes us on a 10,000-year-old journey replete with incredible ideas, inventions, and transformations. From cave drawings to oral histories to libraries to the internet, The Guardian of All Things is the history of how humans have relentlessly pursued new ways to preserve and manage memory, both within the human brain and as a series of inventions external to it. Michael S. Malone looks at the story of memory, both human and mechanical, and the historic turning points in that story that have not only changed our relationship to memory, but have also changed our human fabric. Full of anecdotes, history, and advances of civilization and technology, The Guardian of All Things is a lively, epic journey along a trajectory of history no other book has ever described, one that will appeal to the curious as well as the specialist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"he story of memory... is the story of freedom," writes ABCNews.com technology writer Malone (The Future Arrived Yesterday) in this sweeping and ambitious story. He traces the spread of memory and the ability to record memories from the individual to the tribe, to rulers and bureaucrats, to everyone the "democratization of memory." Conducting us on a tour of the development of human memory, Malone explains its forms and function, from Neanderthals, who, he speculates, had tremendous sensory capacity but no language to capture their perceptions for the future, to the invention of writing, which enabled societies to preserve memories; Cicero, who developed an art of memory so he could recall his long speeches; and the Middle Ages, when human memory functioned as a mechanism for selecting, translating, compiling, and interpreting newly rediscovered ancient knowledge. By the 21st century, humans have the capacity to control memory in ways previously unimaginable: through the use of computers and memory implants. Malone celebrates the power of memory and the freedom it provides us while at the same time cautioning us to guard our memories and protect the record of our time in the world.
