Monthly Archives: August 2012

Happy Civic Holiday to my Canadian compatriots. Being in a holiday mood, I’ve selected some summery items for this Monday’s Link Roundup. Two of my favorite articles are My summer memories are up for sale and Why road trips rule over resorts. And if you can’t get away, then the next best thing might be to read a travel memoir. Check out some good reading at A World On The Page: Five Great Travel Memoirs.

• The Science of How We Came to Live and Breathe Stories. “Stories aren’t merely essential to how we understand the world — they are how we understand the world…In The Storytelling Animal, educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively.”

• Memories, Lighting the Corners of Minds. “I went to the annual conference of biography writers last year in Washington DC…I soon realized how much biographers depend on written records, and how often those written records are letters. Letters that have gone the way of the dodo bird in our new electronic world…I realized personal memoirs would be the only written records of what it was like to grow up in West Virginia before electricity. Before a lot of things. Someday in the not too distant future, if you want to know what it was like “back then” these memoirs will be the only way to know.Thus,these memoirs can serve a much greater social purpose than simply memoir. They are the written records of how we lived. It isn’t an indulgence to write them. It’s a social imperative. There may not be a lot of people who want to read these memoirs. There may only be one. But that one might be a historian doing research in the far distant future and if we want them, those kids of ours, to know what it was like, we have to tell them now.”

• Why road trips rule over resorts. “Road trips have inherent downsides – people throwing up, bad hotels, children fighting in the back seat – but the odd thing is that as people grow into adults, they remember this with fondness. Those difficulties are put into a sentimental context of family memory,” says Susan Sessions Rugh, a history professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who wrote the book Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations.”

• Historians discover medieval banking records hidden under coats of arms. “A rare accounting document, half-concealed beneath a coat of arms design, has revealed the activities of Italian bankers working in early 15th century London, decades before the capital became a financial powerhouse. The discovery was made by economic historians at Queen Mary, University of London.”

• My summer memories are up for sale. “My Mum sent me a real-estate listing today. It turns out that my uncle is selling the old family cottage where we spent our summers when I was a kid. And since nobody in the family can afford to buy it, pretty soon it will no longer be a part of the family at all.”

• Are You Brilliant At Marketing? “Are you brilliant at marketing? We think you can be., We’ve assembled some great links meant to boost your marketing creativity. Check them out and see how “brilliant” you can become.”

• A World On The Page: Five Great Travel Memoirs. “Let’s stay put this summer. Let’s live other lives from the comfort of our couches. Crank the AC and allow these five books to take you to other worlds. But be warned: These are dangerous places, the underbellies of our great cities. You’ll meet unforgettable characters: a future first lady, a one-booted hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail, a young Angela Davis. You’ll encounter beauty, bravery, chilling strangeness — and you won’t even have to take off your Slanket.”

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