excellent. Unparalleled in its prose, and sharp in a way few books achieve on modern political geography, landscapes of dissent, and landscapes of possibility.
Excellent book for those who work with and on the land, C Some interesting essays, but a lot of them were way too longwinded and went on uninteresting tangents, Still, some interesting reads. A great introduction to an amazing thinker, activist, historian, cultural critic, art critic, Solnit's ability to weave seemingly disparate elements into a single narrative is truly powerful and moving, Plus, she's just so good at uncovering the hypocrisies in American history and politics, Prepare to have thoughts provoked, Some essays were eloquent and insightful, but some were tedious and repetitive, I'll probably revisit some of the essays in the years to come, but there are many I'll never look at or think about again.
Solnit is a hero to me she defines what activism can mean and accomplish, I read these essays, and I get the message: not all you do will change the world dramatically, but you have to at least care, at least FEEL some sort of passion for the planet we live on, and then do something about it! I have never been willing to be arrested for protesting, but I imagine I might be on a FBI list for emails against Bush's policies.
. . and circulating a Swiss German poster of Bush, . . Her main focus is environmentalism, but she writes about the antislavery movement, immigrant rights, and protests against the evils of capitalism with the same focus and clarity.
Besides that, she is a great, great writer,
With Solnit, there are always coincidences in my own life that make me even more in awe of what she has to say.
For example, one night I had a crazy dream of a tsunami, and the next morning, over breakfast, I read her essay, Sontag and Tsunami.
"We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference.
. . the relief will be very political, in who gives how much Bush offeringmillion, thenmillion under pressure, the cost of his inauguration adn thenmillion under strong international pressure.
. . but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent, We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality, . . we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control.
. . But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact.
And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish, "
"A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country.
The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no.
And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved, he places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break.
Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here were consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists.
. . and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.
I had that same conversation in Zurich with expat American friends, native Swiss, a German, and a Spaniard.
We had just walked by the poster with a picture of George W, Bush in Swiss German and they translated it as "Wanted for crimes against humanity considered armed and dangerous, " And I may not be proud of the things my country does, but I love it, for its people and its nooks and crannies I have spent so much time exploring.
That is part of what makes up a country also, its geography and landscapes, not just its terrible politics and foreign policies.
I have been in awe of all the constellations I have been seeing lately here in Denver, Orion and the Pleiades are amazingly bright right now another little convergence with Solnit and her esay about constellation as metaphor: "The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the, to be the constellationmaker and the center of the world, that center called love.
To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak adn be perfectly understood.
" She writes about how many of us have never seen the Milky Way, "which showed up in San Francisco only during the velvety darkness of the blackout brought on by theLoma Prieta earthquake.
. or that in the great blackout of, the Milky Way presided over Manhattan for the first time in perhaps a century.
"
Rebecca Solnit, be still my heart, More journalistic than literary, but still mindblowingly brilliant and thoughtprovoking, I'm on a Rebecca Solnit binge, This one might be a little drier, as it's a collection of articles and so far my biggest fault with it is the print is really small.
I'm excited to see where she takes me and I love that she can combine journalism, memoir, and critical thought into the same piece.
. . I was on the brink of abandoning this book, however, until Pablo commented on my review and gave me the wherewithal to continue.
I'm so glad I did! Once I allowed myself to skip a few of the essays, I was completely transported by Solnit's observations and intellect.
I also loved it because she reused some of the ideas that appear in "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but expanded on them.
It was a good insight into a writers process, Plus, I got one of my favorite quotes ever:
"It is not efficient to have a body, It is not, by the same criteria, efficient to be alive, Life is inconvenient, but that's hardly the best measure of what it's for, " Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual.
Storming the Gates of Paradise, an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.
S. Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to todays street protests.
The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millenniumnot just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnits subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests.
She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view.
Her introduction sets the tone and the books overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch.
In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison.
These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnits pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar.
Illustrated throughout, Storming the Gates of Paradise represents recent developments in Solnits thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.
I stole this from Leslie when I was out west, Stayed up late reading last night and, as expected, AMAZING, I want to tell everyone who has just been introduced to Solnit's work to start with her books on environmental activism.
Although dense, these essays are beautifully written and are so much more engaging than her more popular books on feminism.
I admire how much Solnit knows about her city, San Francisco, I think her writing in this is an amazing example of what it means to pay attention and also reminded me of Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing".
I feel as if her ideas in this book could very well fit Jenny Odell's idea of "doing nothing" and of paying attention to the history of where you are and where you will go.
Much of my thinking was validated by Rebecca's writing which made this book extremely engaging to read for example, her opinion on cars, on "heartless" cities, and on the immense privileges granted to us, depending on where we live, that we are hardly aware of.
I'm also glad that Solnit managed to talk about race in this book, too, She doesn't do as well as a job in her books about feminism and sort of shies away from the subject If I remember correctly, she only listed statistics without substantiating it.
She goes into the subject of the history of names and how often Native American history is consistently on the verge of being erased:
"There is a great incongruity in the names of men upon the land, for these rogues and bureaucrats are too recent and prosaic to convey the benediction of saints, heroes, gods.
Instead of the certainties of mythology, they conveyto those who know the history of the namesturbulence, economics, ambition, and brutality.
In Europe, white people are indigenous, and they are often named after places, Some AngloAmericans were named Winchester after the English cathedral town, and so were some eastern U, S. towns, but the western townsthere are twentyone Winchesters in the United Statesare often named after the men who bore that placename, including two towns honoring the inventor of the Winchester repeating rifle, “the gun that won the West.
” Winchester itself comes from a preCeltic word and a Latin suffix,chester, meaning a walled town, and the word is at least twelve centuries old.
When places are named after men and not the other way around, people become more real and permanent than land.
As Robert Frost once observed, “The land was ours before we were the lands, "
This book got me thinking about so many things! It encouraged me to get into landscape photography, which she discusses in a few essays at the beginning of the book.
She's introduced me to so many landscape photographers, books, and activists who have done so much for the environment,
The biggest criticism I have with this book is the use of the term "disabled" in the essay "Seven Stepping Stones down the Primrose Path".
I understand that being "conceptually disabled" due to people believing they always need mechanical assistance in order to get around is a thing, but I wish the author could've delved in to the politics of disability and landscape.
She acknowledges in her other book, "Wanderlust", that "If walking is a primary cultural act and a crucial way of being in the world, those who have been unable to walk out as far as their feet would have not been denied merely exercise or recreation but a vast portion of her humanity.
" Surprisingly, this thought wasn't given much depth in this book, which is sad, because I think that disabled people have a different relationship to landscape and walking.
Not everyone is able to walk, or run, or go sightseeing as often as others can, I would've loved for this to be discussed more, especially since it's central to her idea:
"When I wrote about walking, I learned that one version of home is everything you can walk to.
Thus I, with my few hundred square feet of rented space, can also claim a thousandacre park that ends at the Pacific with a beach full of seabirds four or five movie theaters hundreds of restaurants, bars, and cafés a big public library way too many tattoo parlors a fine collection of monuments, views, promenades, and more.
"
I loved this book, and although it is very dense and packed full of information, I think that Solnit did a great job at organizing her writing.
Each essay compliments each other beautifully, and her writing is full of profound meaning, I enjoyed this book a lot and will be revisiting it often, It has really shown me the best of Rebecca Solnit's writing skills, even after I was absolutely convinced after reading her memoir, "The Faraway Nearby", she is equally the amount of genius on her nonfiction writing about the environment.
"There are no grand solutions, only everyday practices of paying attention, of valuing difference and the openness that comes with some risk, of rethinking home, and refusing to be afraid.
"
I apologize for my typos or grammar errors, I wrote this on my iPhone Solnit is always an incredibly read.
She is stellar when discussing the early environmental activists of California and the US, even more stellar and affecting when getting into antiwar activism, and even when I disagree with her I can do so intelligently, carrying on the discussion begun by the essay in my head.
When she's wrong, she's wrong in a way I can most often respect aside from her very occasional forays into elitism that makes her both dismiss the internet and come off as, well, elitist but this only happens two or three times in apage book, and I also highly appreciate the way she doesn't gloss over failings of icons like Friedan, even when her essay is focusing on what Friedan's work initiated in terms of social change and activism.
In short: this is bright, conscientious, and deeply empathetic work, Highly recommended, particularly the firstsections of the book and the last, her love song to San Francisco, Moreover, this is a book that is deeply conscious of the dark portions of America's past, as she devotes a large section to her discussion of nature as public space to the struggle of Native Americans to regain the rights to what should be their land or prevent new injustices to be done to it.
Solnit's work spans three hundred years, two or three continents, and countless activists and writers, starting with Thoreau and ending in the racist socalled urban renewal projects of thes ands.
I love the way she talks about activism, with hope and empathy:
, . . a passion for justice and pleasure in small things are not incompatible, It's possible to do both, to talk about trees and justice and in our time, justice for trees that's part of what Thoreau's short jaunt from jail to hill says.
She is a remarkable writer, too:
Metaphors matter, They make tangible the abstractions with which we must wrestle, They describe the resemblances and differences by which we navigate our lives and thoughts, I published a book recently called Hope in the Dark, which the inattentive routinely call "Hope in Dark Times.
" Dark times, like dark ages, are gloomy, harsh, dangerous, depressing, when the good stuff has fled, But the darkness I was after was another thing entirely, This wasn't hope despite the dark darkness was the ground and condition of that hope, . . Hope in the dark is hope in the future, in its constant ability to surprise you, its expansiveness beyond the bounds of the imaginable.
.