And memory, or its corollary, forgetfulness and amnesia, weaves a spider's web throughout the book.
In 2001, the national psyche exercised its formidable forgetfulness once again as the majority of Israelis voted Sharon Prime Minister.
In the book, Ms. Livesey circles Santayana's statement that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and its correlative, "only forgetfulness sets us free".
Indeed, the charm of work is its promise of forgetfulness, not of immortality.
Yet looking more deeply, we are all participants in a culture of violence with its accompanying apathy, forgetfulness, willful ignorance, denial, spineless narrow self-interest, hypocrisy, and ideological intransigence.
The participants also narrated their perception of dementia, how they feel about forgetfulness, its causes, and the ways they try to cope with it.
At the same time it produces forgetfulness.
Nor is it just forgetfulness to ignore the turn to austerity at the onset of the downturn of the early 1930s, and its contribution to converting a recession into the Great Depression.
In his book America's Forgotten Pandemic, Alfred Crosby offered an explanation as to why that might be: "The very nature of the disease and its epidemiological characteristics encouraged forgetfulness in the societies it affected.
Its working title was Forgetfulness.
