In this strikingly original look at modern culture, Robert Fulford pursues an unusual subject across a bizarre landscape whose features include urban legends, 'The Birth of a Nation', Jack Nicholson, Ivanhoe, TV News, Vladimir Nabokov, sex scandals and gossip, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Fulford sees storytelling as the core of civilized life, the bundle in which we wrap truth, hope, and dread. Narrative, he says, is how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves -- and how we often do all three at once. He distills half a century of experience, and he asserts with special passion 'the value of those unruly and unaccredited forms of narrative that arise from conversation, in particular the stories, true and untrue, that we tell about ourselves and people we know.'