Volume 45, Number 7 · April 23, 1998
Cards of Identity
By Richard Jenkyns
Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History
by David Lowenthal
Free Press, 338 pp., $25.00
The trouble with the attempts to preserve various forms of 'heritage,' David Lowenthal argues, is that they have become so unselective: nothing seems immune from preservation or museumification—buttons, barbed wire, the historic linoleum on the floor. His new book, Possessed by the Past, appears a little like that at times: it can seem as though there was no jotting in his card index that he could bear to throw away. But he is an alert and indefatigable snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. Cheerfully jaundiced, exuberantly glum, he shuffles a kaleidoscope of quotation and comment on every aspect of the heritage phenomenon: books, magazines, newspapers, jokes, anecdotes, and personal experience. An American who lives in England, he draws the greater part of his examples from the two countries he knows best, but his gaze is over all the world, and a single paragraph may leap from the Navaho to the Basque country to the Yakut of the Siberian taiga. He can be very funny, as in his account of the scruffy surroundings of Stonehenge and the battles between druids, hippies, police, and conservationists for control of the site; he is energetic, stimulating, self-contradictory, entertaining, sometimes provoking, and sometimes completely irrelevant. The effect brings to mind a small boy's stamp album: lots of little brightly colored bits and pieces, lots of enthusiasm, but a few of the stamps are stuck in askew, or on the wrong page.
Review, 5331 words
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