An utterly engrossing contemporary history of forgotten and destroyed places. ( )

Discovered this title via a review in Shelf Awareness. The premise - or maybe it was really just the title - interested me, but my interest faded and I did not finish the second-to-last or last chapters. The author does make a good point about the neutral, objective third-person voice used in nonfiction writing being somewhat deceptive, as every student of history knows there is no one single objective truth.

Chapter 1: Being There

"Place is primary because it is the experiential fact of our existence." -Robert Sack & J.E. Malpas (4)

Why, in disciplines that aspire to verifiable truth, do scholars sustain the fiction, when researching and writing, that they are not there?
Academics recoil from the first-person narrative, in part, because to confess to being there is to call into doubt one's objectivity and legitimacy. I find this strange because scholars readily admit to one another that there is no unmediated account, that each interpretation of reality is a highly specific and partial way of organizing the world. (11)

...I have been attentive to people who appear to be unreliable narrators, because it is the stifled voices, the words left unsaid, that haunt most societies. (16)

Chapter 2: The Panama Hotel, Japanese America, and the Irrepressible Past

The basement of the Panama Hotel contains things that could not be stuffed into two suitcases....This mountain of family property speaks to how deprivation of such abstractions as citizenship and freedom is accompanied by forfeiture of concrete things - possessions, homes, jobs - which in turn strips people of other abstractions. Divested of books, they lose part of their knowledge... (24)

Chapter 3: History (Im)Possible in the Chernobyl Zone

I use the unreliable narrator to point out the highly subjective qualities of historical research, which creates provisional truths about the past - truths that are certain to change....Literary critiques study narrative voice in fiction, but the invented qualities of nonfiction narrators are usually left unquestioned. (45)

Chapter 4: Bodily Secrets

An interview is a negotiation. Both the interviewer and the subject have something they want to get out of it. (63)

This splintering of body and environment into discrete fields, historian Linda Nash notes, "made it difficult to draw connections between environmental change and changes in human health." ...[Chronic Radiation Syndrome] never became a diagnosis in American medical tradition largely because it would never hold up in court....Most [American] researchers just didn't think that way. (72-72)

Chapter 5: Sacred Space in a Sullied Garden

We [physician, ethnographer, historian] no longer watched from on high or a distance, and that gave us access to insights we did not have before. Judgment and verdict transformed into understanding and a suspension of disbelief. (94)

Chapter 6: Gridded Lives

Comparisons can be fruitful. They can also be misleading or overtly political. Anything can be compared to anything. It is a trick of historians to juxtapose historic eras or regimes to point out similarities or differences and thus win an argument. (102) ( )