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How to Change History: A Salvage Project
Paperback
Biographies GeneralLetters & Essays
Publisher Price: $21.95
ISBN13: 9781496240323
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: Mar 1 2025
Pages: 198
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Gold Medal for the 2026 IPPY Award
In How to Change History Robin Hemley grapples with the individual's navigation of history and the conflict between personal and public histories. In an attempt to restore, resurrect, and reclaim what might otherwise be lost, Hemley meditates and speculates on photography, scrapbooks, historical markers, travelogues, TV shows, real estate come-ons, washed up rock stars, incontinent dachshunds, stalkers, skeletons in the closet, and literature. He also examines his parents' lives as writers, documenting their under-seen influence on the art movements of the day.
In one essay, he writes about his mother's first cousin, Roy, a survivor of Pearl Harbor whose troubled daughter murdered him. The essay Jim's Corner examines the notion of memorial plaques and how they often highlight erasure rather than forestall it. Hemley writes about a stranger whose World War II experiences were chronicled in a scrapbook Hemley bought at an estate sale. In this book about reconstruction, Hemley posits that while we cannot change events once they have passed, we can return to those events to learn and sometimes perhaps change our understanding of them.
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