"Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion" by Agnes Arnold-Forster is a well-researched investigation into one of the most complex emotions. Starting with ‘homesickness’, she delves into the historical, cultural, and psychological dimensions of nostalgia. Arnold-Forster offers a nuanced analysis of common mi and sheds light on its meaning throughout history.

The book's strengths lie in its interdisciplinary approach, drawing from psychology, literature, and sociology to provide a richer view of nostalgia. Through research and engaging storytelling, Arnold-Forster traces the history of nostalgia from its origins as a medical diagnosis to its contemporary appearance in popular culture.

What sets "Nostalgia" apart is its recognition of the dual personality of nostalgia – both comforting and destabilising, equally personal and collective. Arnold-Forster navigates these complexities, addressing how nostalgia can improve our being with a sense of connection while also trapping us in utopian version of the past.

The book is rich in insights and analysis, which some readers may find too academic. A more structured story could enhance the book's accessibility for a wider audience.

Overall, "Nostalgia " is an interesting and educational read that offers fascinating insights into the human experience.

Fascinating history, Arnold-Forster is a very engaging and sharp writer and distills complex ideas well.

I thoroughly enjoy non fiction when it is simplified, made easily accessible, and reminds me of how complex we humans are. Yet, Nostalgia reminds me of our complexities, and how influenced we are by emotion. How we are manipulated for emotional and financial gain (losses for us), and how it surely can't be sustainable as a species.

A hugely important book on current society, and for those who like to reflect.

This was an interesting read. However, there were times when it became overly repetitive, which took away some of the excitement. Although a few aspects of the book were really fascinating, it was written in a dry manner, making it seem more like an academic paper. This isn't a negative aspect of the book, but it wasn't what I was expecting when I picked it up to read.

One of the most intriguing things I learned from the book was about how nostalgia was considered an illness that had the potential to kill people in the past. I had never heard of such a concept before, and it certainly left me with a lot to think about and because it was well referenced through I can read more about this as and when I wish.

What I especially appreciated about the book was its well-balanced approach. For instance, in the chapter that talked about politics, the author was able to demonstrate how both sides of the political spectrum use nostalgia as a way of attracting voters. This made the book all the more engaging and thought-provoking.


Overall, worth a read although it didn't captive me in the way I thought it would, which is probably down more to my expectations than the authors writing.

*Thank you to the author, publishers and Netgalley for the ARC of this book. This is my honest review.*

Nostalgia isn't an emotion I've ever particularly given much thought outside of the times I'm hit with it. So, reading this, I didn't have any particular expectations.

This book is a fascinating dive into the history of nostalgia across centuries as it transformed from a disease to a benign emotion. I enjoyed learning the extent to which many aspects of history, culture and life - including imperialism, healthcare, politics and heritage - nostalgia is tied to. The discussion on heritage and historical re-enactors in relation to academic historians was particularly interesting to me - studying history and looking into heritage work.

I also really appreciated how well the book was structured - which a sense of both chronology and theme separating the chapters making everything much easier to follow. The writing style was similarly accessible and I felt that it allowed me to better follow discussions that dipped into aspects of science or history that I'm otherwise unfamiliar with.

All in all, a really interesting and enlightening read.

Thanks to the pubisher and NetGalley for the e-ARC. I really enjoyed this thorough and well researched piece on nostalgia, tracing its roots as an illness to how it is so often perceived now (and the influence of Enid Blyton along the way).

Agnes Arnold-Foster's 'Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion' traces nostalgia's transformation from a life-threatening homesickness among the displaced in the seventeenth century to its current political implications, as seen in slogans like "Make America Great Again." Initially, nostalgia described a profound longing for home, not the past, it's certainly in depth and adds great value to the notion of nostalgia through the ages.

Agnes Arnold-Foster’s book, Nostalgia, has the sub-title “A History of a Dangerous Emotion.” The book takes us from the late seventeenth century up to the present day with Trump and “Make America Great Again.” At first, nostalgia referred to what we would call “acute homesickness”. Students, soldiers and others, uprooted from their home and transposed to another country, region or even town, would yearn for home so much that they would lose interest in food and drink, sometimes leading to their death. Remember, the world was different then: travel was much slower and far fewer people moved far from their birthplace. Being somewhere vastly different from home was profoundly disorienting and many just could not cope. Nostalgia then was about longing for a place, not a past time.

The author shows us how, as the general pace of life increased with canals, railways and then motor vehicles, the trauma of travelling lessened and the disease mutated. She does a thorough job of tracking how the medical fraternity (physicians, psychologists, psychoanalysts, etc) changed their views over time too. I was surprised how much doctors’ personal views can colour how they perceive a disease. For example, Freud, Jung and others fled the Nazis and resettled in another country. They were scornful of people who looked back to a better past because, for those doctors, the past in Nazi Germany was not better. They felt that patients should look forward to a much brighter future and not backwards to the past. As that generation of immigrant doctors was succeeded by newer generations, the medical perception of nostalgia changed again.

Nostalgia (as we know it today: the affectionate longing for a past time) and homesickness parted company in the early twentieth century but the nostalgia industry really took off after the 1960s, permeating everyone’s world. Do you have any Lilliput Lane models of olde-worlde buildings? Any artist’s Greatest Hits album? Do you prefer the music of your youth (whenever that was) to anything released after that? If so, you’re a victim of nostalgia marketing. The past was NOT all good: does anyone want to bring back typhoid and diphtheria? Workhouses and no unemployment benefit? Blatant, legal, gender inequality? No, me neither – so why do we unconsciously block out those aspects of past times? As Arnold-Foster shows us, nostalgic yearnings tell us much more about present-day anxieties than about a past that possible never existed.

I cannot deny that parts of the book dragged for me and I suspect the author has sometimes mistaken correlation for causation, e.g. “Nationalism was a precondition for the rise of nostalgia”, but I learned a lot. Did you know that the last enslaved person forcibly taken from Africa to the US didn’t die until 1940? She was Matilda McCrear. This is a thoughtful analysis of what I thought was just an emotion but turns about to be a huge business - and an easy way for politicians, advertisers and the media to manipulate us. I recommend reading the book to understand how they do this.
#Nostalgia #NetGalley

Review: Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster

The history of Nostalgia is quite an interesting one. The sickness was first mentioned by a doctor in 1669. He identified it as ‘an illness associated with being uprooted, a sickness of displacement, a kind of sadness or depression that arose from the desire to return to one’s home’ or homesickness. We learn that during history it was once understood as an indicator of emotional sensitivity and heroic patriotism for some people, all while being seen as a sign of weakness for others.

Soon nostalgia and homesickness parted ways. The first one was seen as an ill-informed bond with the past and the latter an infantile attachment to family and home. What used to be a virtue was, under growing importance of capitalism and an increasingly global world, now seen as infantile and trivial. From the nineteenth century onwards nostalgia was seen as symptom, a pathological response to the sped up pace of modern life and the anxieties of the time. While Victorians worried about the impact of railways on their lives, today we worry about the consequences of social media. While nostalgia evolved with time it was always not just a social, but also political emotion.

The book’s topic immediately caught my interest, while not really knowing what to expect from it. I found it very intriguing and quickly learned there’s much more to nostalgia than I thought. While I enjoyed the overall read some chapters took me a bit longer than others to finish. If you’re interested in psychology, neuroscience, medical history and history in general Nostalgia should be on your non-fiction reading list this year :)