Patrick Nunn received his PhD from the University of London before spending 25 years teaching and researching at the international University of the South Pacific in Fiji, where he was appointed Professor of Oceanic Geoscience in 1996. He moved to Australia in 2010 to work at the University of New England before being appointed to a research professorship at the University of the Sunshine Coast in 2014. Patrick has more than 230 peer-reviewed publications to his credit and he has written several books, including Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific, which was named among the `Best of the Best from the University Presses' in 2009 by the American Library Association.
In this sweeping, masterful volume, Nunn stitches together evidence from geology, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, history and geography to bring to our collective attention the many durable myths and legends of Indigenous oral traditions. If you care about the future of the planet, and our survival on it, The Edge of Memory is a must-read book. -- Chris Gibson, Editor-in-Chief, Australian Geographer, and Professor of Geography, University of Wollongong, Australia Nunn's book is the newest jewel in the recent chain of research showing, through geological verification, that human oral traditions often record real events back 10,000 years and more. He shows that such ancient fact-bearing stories, usually dismissed as just myths , occur the world around. The book is an engagingly written must-read: I couldn't put it down. -- Elizabeth Wayland Barber, co-author of When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth A very important book that shows how non-literate people preserved their observations of memorable events for as much as ten millennia, and their recollections can also help us to face the challenges of environmental changes today. -- Rita Compatangelo-Soussignan, Professor of Ancient History at Le Mans University, France