This Monday’s Author is David Berry!

From television to politics - from Mad Men to MAGA - nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era, and so we’ve put together an Unbound panel of brilliant thinkers who have written about what this means for us as a society. One of those brilliant thinkers is David Berry, author of On Nostalgia.

David’s book is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, David examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before.

We’re so excited to welcome David to Columbia in April!

David Berry is a writer, editor and cultural critic from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He has worked for both of Canada’s national newspapers, and many, many smaller publications around North America. On Nostalgia is his first book. 

His work has appeared in, among other places, the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, the National Post, Toronto Life, the CBC, the Canadian Encyclopedia, Alberta Views and elsewhere. He’s interested in books, film, history, urbanism, public services, camping, the absurd way we struggle on in a world seemingly devoid of meaning, and eating.