A fascinating tour of the past as it exists today, and of the dangers that threaten it, through incisive portraits of our attempts to maintain it: the high-tech struggles to save the Great Sphinx and the Ganges, the efforts to preserve Latin within the Vatican, the digital glut inside the National Archives, which may have caused more information to be lost than ever before, and an oral culture threatened by a “, new”, technology: writing itself. Stille explores not simply the past, but our ideas about the past—, and how they will have to change if our past is to have a future.