Description: Study of how the memorials created in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Center site raise questions about the relationship between cultural memory and consumerism.
Review Quotes: "Tourists of History is a fearless guide through the paranoid landscape of contemporary American culture. Marita Sturken brilliantly maps the ways consumerism and tourism offer avenues of comfort in a threatening world at the same time that they become politically disabling. From the responses to the Oklahoma City bombing to the memorials to the Twin Towers, Sturken shows how the American way of mourning and remembering the dead shores up a conviction in a timeless sense of national innocence. This exceptionally timely book reaches deep into the past and will continue to resonate in the future."--Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture