The World Over

History is like fashion or the climate, wind patterns or the course of a river, it changes. Recording events, preserving, observing, today is reportage, tomorrow it becomes one version of another time and place. The art of the story-teller takes many forms: narrative, drama, the searching out of facts, the discovery of the inroads and backtracking of events. The careful pursuit of the story implies severe commitment to many sources, yet often those who lived those same sources exact their own impression, their own recall, and another, who shared it, might say, "It wasn't like that at all!" Who were the great historians, after all, if not story-tellers, the founders of journalism, creators of interview and chronicle? And so we come to Carol Miller's anthology, a selection of breathtaking texts that describes both personal experience and distant events as she perceives them, and we follow her footsteps, the world over.