Author Event! Howard Mansfield - Invisible Monuments

Invisible Monuments: Tribute, Memory, and the Summoning of the Past by Howard Mansfield

“Howard Mansfield is a 'whisperer' of everyday things: sheds, mountains, meeting houses, the seasons themselves. In his skilled and poetic hands, the simple and familiar are revealed in a complexity and eloquence we never imagined. Invisible Monuments further highlights his extraordinary gifts of language and insight. That time-worn statue in the park that anonymously blends into the scenery? You will never look at it the same way again.”-- Ted Reinstein, anchor, Chronicle, WCVB-TV, Channel 5

Some monuments speak to us. Some are silent. Why?

We live in an era of monument building. Our monuments, often after fierce debate, are dedicated in ceremonies that try to bring life to the stone -- and then we walk away. The mute stones are left to the pigeons. Our grandest efforts at creating a shared, cultural memory melt to invisibility. Why?

Invisible Monuments looks at these moments of commemoration in the familiar and the unfamiliar. We visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Bunker Hill Monument, and a once- venerated World War I memorial in England. We journey to a little-known memorial that one grief-stricken family built stone-by-stone for their son lost in war, a place that still draws thousands each year. And Invisible Monuments looks at the failure to commemorate in the recently rediscovered African Burial Grounds in Manhattan and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and in the unmarked graves of the Irish immigrants who built the railroads in the woods of New Hampshire. We’re also introduced to an audacious attempt to memorialize the future by building a clock deep in a mountain that is designed to run for 10,000 years.

These memorials are attempts to bring us closer to our ancestors, to say that we are still joined hand-to-hand across the centuries. In Vietnam, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, there are two burials. The first to return the body to the earth, and then the second, when the bones are dug up and brought closer to the village. We do the same.

When we commission memorials, we are trying to bring the bones closer to home. The memorials we build are a second burial. In all the current controversies about what to build and how, and what to tear down, we’ve lost track of why we build monuments. We want the counsel of our ancestors – edited, and chiseled into stone.

Invisible Monuments is about tribute, memory, and the summoning of the past.
Howard Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation. He is the author of a dozen books, including The Bones of the Earth, The Same Ax Twice, Chasing Eden, Dwelling in Possibility: Searching for the Soul of Shelter, and In the Memory House which The New York Times called “a wise and beautiful book.”
In Mansfield’s previous book, I Will Tell No War Stories: What Our Fathers Left Unsaid About World War II, he “breaks through the wall of silence some war veterans maintain,” said Booklist. “The result is an impeccably researched and beautifully written account of the stories his father wouldn’t tell. Readers will find themselves in heated sheepskin flight suits and oxygen masks, high in the sky over enemy territory…. A vital and moving history of all that is left unsaid in the aftermath of war and how that affects the next generation.”

Mansfield has been honored by the N.H. Humanities Council as “a gem in our granite landscape” and this fall he will receive the Sarah Josepha Hale Award. He has won a Gold Medal for Commentary for City and Regional Magazines, a silver medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and was a City and Regional Magazine Feature Story Finalist. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Franklin Pierce University. He has served as a writer and consultant for museums, written and performed a stage show with composer Ben Cosgrove that was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning film, and has co-written a forthcoming documentary film.