Everything Is Illuminated, Safran Foer's first novel, published when he was 25, explored the fictive and elusive nature of searching for a devastated past, dramatising it via the device of a language gap.
A readiness to restore, to make amends, to gather up the nerve-endings of history to help a community resume normal life, these are surely the best future for a devastated past.
Mr Bregman dismisses the devastating past decade in a handful of pages.
The use of Native American symbols in sports teams symbolizes the devastating past of colonialism, genocide and invasion.
In the cruel heat of the midday sun, mostly wearing shoes no stouter than flip-flops, the men marched along the ruined road for miles, past a devastated cement factory, past a thousand-tonne coal barge lifted up and set down on the highway like a bath, over a hill running past an Indonesian army post.
But it has been devastated in the past 30 years by privatisation and trade liberalisation, which have forced millions of people off the land and into cities.
In the first round of the Open, she faced Heather Watson and dropped the first set, which would have devastated her in the past.
"I saw a town's drinking water being devastated by pollution, both past and present, and I wanted it stopped," said Mr. Fusco, a Republican.
And the fact is that a major success of our civilization is our ability to prevent diseases that in the past have devastated folks.
The past devastating earthquakes in densely populated urban centers, such as the 1994 Northridge; 1995 Kobe; 1999 series of Kocaeli, Düzce, and Athens; and 2011 Van-Erciş events, showed that substantial social and economic losses can be expected.
Though at least 2,400 people have died from the disease, according to the Associated Press, and people in Liberia have been ordered to stay at home because of the overwhelming risks, there has been a lack of global support, as compared to such past devastating crises as the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
