I think anyone tired of hearing about "patriarchy" and "rape culture" especially needs to read this book, which basically everybody would be better off reading. Solnit is such an amazing thinker. This is not a book about "mansplaining" --Solnit quickly points out her slight displeasure at inadver...
Probably more like 2.5 stars. Overall a pretty good book, if you're looking for something to make the case for feminism and why women deserve equal consideration and a polemic against the scourge of domestic violence. Unfortunately, I'm a bit more of an advanced reader than this, and several of t...
4 stars for presentation, 3.5 for enjoyment. What a fascinating project! The maps & essays in this collection brought to life for me a city and an area with which I have only the barest of familiarity. As an outsider, I didn't feel the same connection to the material that a true San Francisco nat...
Solnit deserves a big round of applause for undertaking what seems like such a simple but at the same time very complex and ambiguous topic to write about. I know many people who have little to no interest in walking as a leisurely activity, and to have them ever consider the underbelly of walkin...
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 Pyrene...
“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” I think m...
The seashore is the place that is no place, sometimes solid land or, rather, sand, sometimes the shallow fringe of that huge body of water governed by the remote body of the moon in a mystery something like love or desire. A body of water is always traveling, and so the border between the land an...
Not the deep blue one with the endpapers that map Greenland and the Canadian arctic. Nor the turquoise one with the Inuit faces on the wide spine. Nor the dark green one with white letters and a white polar bear printed on the coarse fabric cover. But the first English-language book, a thick one ...
At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, about a minute of seismic shaking tore up San Francisco, toppling buildings, particularly those on landfill and swampy ground, cracking and shifting others, collapsing chimneys, breaking water mains and gas lines, twisting streetcar tracks, even tipping h...
