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A Primer for Forgetting
- Getting Past the Past
- Narrated by: Jim Frangione
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
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Publisher's summary
“One of our true superstars of nonfiction” (David Foster Wallace), Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift and Trickster Makes the World, offers a playful and melancholy defense of forgetfulness by exploring the healing effect it can have on the human psyche.
We live in a culture that prizes memory - how much we can store, the quality of what’s preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear - be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness - but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to peace and forgiveness?
A Primer for Forgetting is a remarkable experiment in scholarship, autobiography, and social criticism by the author of the classics The Gift and Trickster Makes This World. It forges a new “history of forgetfulness” by assembling fragments of art and writing from the ancient world to the modern, weighing the potential boons forgetfulness might offer the present moment as a philosophical and political force. It also turns inward, using the author’s own life and memory as a canvas upon which to extol the virtues of a concept too long taken as an evil.
Drawing material from Hesiod to Jorge Luis Borges to Elizabeth Bishop to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from myths and legends to very real and recent traumas both personal and historical, A Primer for Forgetting is a unique and remarkable synthesis that only Lewis Hyde could have produced.
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From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
- By Larbi on 05-18-08
By: Clive James
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How to Write Short
- Word Craft for Fast Times
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Roy Peter Clark
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In How to Write Short , Roy Peter Clark turns his attention to the art of painting a thousand pictures with just a few words. Short forms of writing have always existed - from ship logs and telegrams to prayers and haikus. But in this ever-changing Internet age, short-form writing has become an essential skill. Clark covers how to write effective and powerful titles, headlines, essays, sales pitches, Tweets, letters, and even self-descriptions for online dating services.
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Ironically long
- By Amazon Customer on 03-14-16
By: Roy Peter Clark
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The Black Man: The Father of Civilization, Proven by Biblical History
- By: James Morris Webb
- Narrated by: Rodney Louis Tompkins
- Length: 56 mins
- Unabridged
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James Morris Webb argues that the Black man was the father of civilization, born in the land of Egypt, and that the different branches of science and art were simply transmitted to other races, which, as the ages have rolled by have only been enlarged - and to some extent improved upon. The narrative is rich in quotes from the Bible.
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Wow !! I never thought
- By TONY 810 on 07-24-20
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A Place for Everything
- The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
- By: Judith Flanders
- Narrated by: Julia Winwood
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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From a New York Times best-selling historian comes the story of how the alphabet ordered our world. A Place for Everything is the first-ever history of alphabetization, from the Library of Alexandria to Wikipedia. The story of alphabetical order has been shaped by some of history's most compelling characters, such as industrious and enthusiastic early adopter Samuel Pepys and dedicated alphabet champion Denis Diderot. But though even George Washington was a proponent, many others stuck to older forms of classification.
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You have to love library science
- By A. Yoshida on 10-23-21
By: Judith Flanders
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Dark Archives
- A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin
- By: Megan Rosenbloom
- Narrated by: Justis Bolding
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy - the practice of binding books in this most intimate covering.
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Fascinating
- By Abbey Pflegl on 11-21-21
By: Megan Rosenbloom
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Sacred Treasure - The Cairo Genizah
- The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic
- By: Rabbi Mark Glickman
- Narrated by: Rabbi Mark Glickman
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in an old Egyptian synagogue - the amazing story of one of the most important discoveries in modern religious scholarship. In 1897, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered.
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Not what I thought it would be, but worth it
- By Lisa on 03-14-12
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The Divine Comedy
- By: Clive James - translator, Dante Alighieri
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned poet and critic Clive James presents the crowning achievement of his career: a monumental translation into English verse of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and this translation - decades in the making - gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent and compulsively listenable lyric poem. Written in the early 14th century and completed in 1321, the year of Dante’s death, The Divine Comedy is perhaps the greatest work of epic poetry ever composed.
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Brilliant!
- By Tad Davis on 10-18-13
By: Clive James - translator, and others
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The Written World
- The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization
- By: Martin Puchner
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Martin Puchner leads us on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal the powerful role stories and literature have played in creating the world we have today. Puchner introduces us to numerous visionaries as he explores 16 foundational texts selected from more than 4,000 years of world literature and reveals how writing has inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, the spark of philosophical and political ideas, and the birth of religious beliefs. Indeed, literature has touched generations and changed the course of history.
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Powerful and illuminating!
- By Gloria J. Petit-Clair on 12-04-17
By: Martin Puchner
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Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
- By: Christopher de Hamel
- Narrated by: Christopher de Hamel
- Length: 17 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is rather like meeting a very famous person. We may all pretend that a well-known celebrity is no different from anyone else, and yet there is an undeniable thrill in actually meeting and talking to a person of world stature. The idea for this book, which is entirely new, is to invite the listener into an intimate conversation with a selection of the most famous manuscripts in existence and to let each of those manuscripts illuminate the Middle Ages and sometimes the modern world too.
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I've been waiting a long time for a book like this
- By Robert on 04-15-18
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
- The History and Future of Reading
- By: Leah Price
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed.
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Wasn't a fan.
- By Erika on 12-27-20
By: Leah Price
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
- Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
- By: John Tresch
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
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Know the Real Poe
- By Elliott Wolfe, M.D. on 06-28-21
By: John Tresch
What listeners say about A Primer for Forgetting
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Durian Lover
- 11-24-23
The reason for “the gong” through the whole work.
This audio book should start with a statement that reads. “Due to the nature of one idea or passage finishing and another new idea beginning, there will be a “gong sound” to denote the change.
This can be accomplished easily in print with some form of demarcation, but there is no mention or the presence of a gong, why it’s there or that it’s not some editorial error. It took me some time to figure this out on my own. Maybe this was Hyde taking an attribute out of his trickster book to leave us wondering the whole time, why in the heck there is a gong. But with so many poorly done audiobooks, I was left thinking that the audiobook got a hack job in editing. It would have been FAR more enjoyable to be let in on the reason for the Gong.
I enjoy Lewis Hyde’s work, I have read “The Gift” “The Trickster” and now this audio book.
For a book on memory I imagine that there is nothing else like it. It is not a typical book, it isn’t written continuously and in a specific direction, it circumambulates in as many ways as it can find around memory and the purpose, function, reason, telos for forgetting.
It leaves you knowing that you have forgotten most everything that you have ever known or experienced, most of this book, and we too, will be forgotten, and maybe remembered again, who knows. It’s a great mystery after all.
I can’t imagine the book being more impactful for what its aim was.
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- Christopher F. Wilson
- 11-01-19
Helpful about importance of forgetting
Lewis Hyde was head writing instructor at Harvard and a MacArthur "genius grant" writer. This book is an interesting set of notebooks (mostly quotes from interesting sources) about the under-appreciated importance of forgetting the right things at the right times. Sort of like the under-appreciated importance of sleep (which Crick says is designed to aid forgetting, which is essential to organizing working memory). Getting good at forgetting (and good at sleeping) is probably performance and happiness enhancing. Sorry to say Hyde is not saying he has all the answers, but he brings up important points. Just like a greed or hunger for physical possessions can harm performance and happiness, so too a refusal to be tactical and strategic about what to remember and when can be a hindrance and unskillful. Thankfully, this book may help one sort out a set of useful personal guidelines about what to forget and when, to maximize personal happiness and effectiveness. (Based on 1/4 of the book - still working my way through it.)
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2 people found this helpful
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- Mary F.
- 07-03-19
Unfortunately ruined by bell ringing after every few sentences.
Content of book and narration were excellent. However, after every few sentences a deep bell or gong sounds. I can understand using this device at the end or beginning of a chapter. However, it was so disruptive and overwhelming. I returned the audiobook after developing a headache. This is only time I returned an audiobook and bought the hardback!
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4 people found this helpful