Solnit delineates the uneven skyline of the many uncertainties that shape our expectations with surgeon’s precision, employing the perfect choice of words and metaphors, so that the reader falls under the false impression of being handed a map that will eventually lead him to the steady inner balance that will help him navigate the unpredictability of life. The opening chapter of this book can be misleading.

Historian, poet, philosopher, thinker, this woman can write about anything and writes looking up at the stars, her feet firmly rooted in the dirt. I could have lived inside Rebecca Solnit's head forever, following the trails of thoughts that spread and separated and merged like weeds at the edges of a river. One of the most elegant and arresting intellectual digressions that I have ever read. Someone says 'heads' or 'tails' and suddenly you are thrown high up in the air, as high as you can go.Īs you twirl, you meet Walter Benjamin and his illuminations, you meet Daniel Boone and his adventures in the wilderness, you meet Robert Hass and Simone Weil, you meet the color blue and all its meanings, you meet Cabeza de Vaca, Eunice Williams, Mary Jemison and Cynthia Ann Parker, you meet the Clash and Isak Dinesen, you meet Alfred Hitchcock and his vertigo, you meet Yves Klein and the blue of distance, you meet the desert and rattlesnakes, you meet lovers and friends and houses and maps and cartographers.

You're resting quietly in somebody's palm. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub. Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award).

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