In Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken attempts to explain how events take on cultural meaning through what she calls "technologies of memory," primarily monuments, texts, icons and images. She argues memory has as much to do with fantasy and invention as with truth and that it attains a narrative form separate from history and possessed of its own political significance. Although it focuses primarily on the Vietnam War and the AIDS epidemic, her book also takes in the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, the beating of Rodney King, and the Gulf War. Sturken's conclusions are often belabored: that the American Vietnam memorial fails to capture the horrors brought upon the Vietnamese people is a rather unoriginal and obvious insight she blames on the "underlying nationalism of the Washington Mall." Does the AIDS quilt she documents likewise obscure the worldwide ravages of the disease when spread upon the Mall? The theoretical discussion of memory and representation often bogs down in the political positions the author assumes rather than defends. One of the pities of such difficult exposition is that a relatively superb chapter on the Gulf War is "forgotten,"a mere 22 pages of her 358-page book.


The New York Times Book Review, Todd Gitlin
Much current academic labor jargonizes the obvious and blurs its own focus on the ways in which culture is soaked in politics. Inside the turgid prose, important questions are struggling to get out.


From Booklist
Where some see U.S. culture as amnesiac, Sturken, of the University of Southern California' Annenberg School for Communication, analyzes key events of the past several decades and argues "cultural memory is a central aspect of how American culture functions and how the nation is defined." (Sturken's memory is Foucaultian, integrating "elements of remembrance, fantasy, and invention . . . in an active, engaging practice of creating meaning.") She focuses primarily on the Vietnam War and AIDS: national traumas that "disrupted definitions of family, gender, morality, and the nation" and "produced very rich kinds of memories and memory debates," including resonant representations in the Wall in Washington, D.C., and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Sturken also assesses the impact on national culture of other recent events--from the assassinations of the sixties and the Challenger explosion to the Gulf War and the Rodney King beating--and explores disparate effects of various media: still photos, amateur film and video, Hollywood docudrama, and TV news. Appropriate for social-science collections where cultural studies circulate. Mary Carroll

FROM THE PUBLISHER