Bøger af Lauren Markham

"I am in need of a word," writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost--a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what's to come? In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative--the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a "ghost forest" of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park--in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create "a psychic space for feeling" while spurring action and agitating for change?Immemorial is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.

"A provocative, virtuosic inquiry that reveals how the valorization of times and migrations past are intimately linked to our exclusion and demonization of migrants in the present When and how did migration become a crime? Why did "Greek ideals" become foundational to the West's idea of itself? How have our personal migration myths -and our nostalgia for a lost world of clear borders and values - shaped our troubling new realities? In 2020, Lauren Markham went to Greece to cover the burning of a refugee camp on Lesbos. Some said the refugees had done it, to destroy what had become their prison. Others said it was the island's fascists, or the government itself, enraged at the burden they bore for an overwhelming global problem. Soon-too soon-six young Afghan refugees were arrested. As she immersed herself in the reporting, Markham-an American of Greek heritage who had been working with and writing about migrants for more than a decade-saw that the story she was reporting was part of a larger tapestry, with roots not only in centuries of history but in the myths we tell ourselves about who we are. In this mesmerizing, trailblazing synthesis of reporting, history, memoir, and essay, A Map of Future Ruins makes us realize that the stories we tell about migration don't just explain what happened. They are oracles: they predict the future"--]cProvided by publisher.