European University Institute Library

Dispatches from dystopia, histories of places not yet forgotten, Kate Brown

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-192) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Dispatches from dystopia

bibliography

887849360

Kate Brown

histories of places not yet forgotten

The author "wanders the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, first on the Internet and then in person, to figure out which version -- the real or the virtual -- is the actual forgery. She also takes us to the basement of a hotel in Seattle to examine the personal possessions left in storage by Japanese Americans on their way to internment camps in 1942. In Uman, Ukraine, we hide with Brown in a tree in order to witness the male-only Rosh Hashanah celebration of Hasidic Jews. In the Russian southern Urals, she speaks with the citizens of the small city of Kyshtym, where invisible radioactive pollutants have mysteriously blighted lives. Finally, Brown returns home to Elgin, Illinois, in the industrial rust belt, to investigate the rise of "rustalgia" and the ways her formative experiences have inspired her obsession with modernist wastelands."--, Provided by publisher

Being there -- The Panama Hotel, Japanese America, and the irrepressible past -- History (im)possible in the Chernobyl zone -- Bodily secrets -- Sacred space in a sullied garden -- Gridded lives: why Kazakhstan and Montana are nearly the same place -- Returning home to Rustalgia