How We Disappear

"A beautiful and profoundly moving meditation on memory, loss and about what survives us—and what doesn’t. This is intellectual history at its most intimate: learned, lucid and deeply personal." -- Peter Frankopan, author of The Earth Transformed
"Both scientifically authoritative and deeply, movingly poetic, How We Disappear is a reckoning with impermanence that doubles as a lesson in how entropy actually functions. I don’t mind knowing that I’m both living and dying at once if it means I can spend a bit of my time on earth in the company of a mind like Thomas S. Mullaney’s." -- Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age and The Immortal King Rao
"From the personal to the cosmic, loss and disappearance give up their terrors as Thomas S. Mullaney ranges with encyclopedic erudition from fossils to tax returns, photographs, sonograms, language, digitization, and far more in an idiosyncratic history of technology that is also a history of History, its dreams and its errors." -- Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
"A stunning meditation on history, memory, and loss. Toggling between the history of information and the history of his father's life, moving fluidly across the ‘archives of humankind,’ Mullaney speaks to us—in one breath—as historian, philosopher, and descendant, searching for meaning in the face of loss and the ‘will to keep on living.’" -- Kendra Taira Field, author of The Stories We Tell (forthcoming) and Chief Historian of The Million Names Project
"Unlike anything I’ve ever read, this book works through painful memories of personal loss as a metaphor for the inevitable tradeoff between communication and the loss of information. But what makes this book really special is Mullaney’s prose, taking the reader on an exhilarating journey of mental time travel across vast distances in time and space." -- Charan Ranganath, author of Why We Remember