Showing results by author "Rebecca Solnit" in All Categories

Roses, pleasure, and politics: a fresh take on Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world. "Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening" wrote George Orwell in 1940. Inspired by her encounter with the surviving roses that Orwell planted in his cottage in Hertfordshire, Rebecca Solnit explores how his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.

Rebecca Solnit maps the extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights that we've experienced over the last fifty years, which has profoundly changed our world. In recognising the interdependent and symbiotic relationships in nature and among humans, this revolution is beginning to overturn capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the human domination of nature - despite the best efforts of the old world to fight back.

A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become - one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope. This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq. Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the 21st century.

Rebecca Solnit's essay 'Men Explain Things to Me' has become a touchstone of the feminist movement, inspired the term 'mansplaining', and established Solnit as one of the leading feminist thinkers of our time - one who has inspired everyone from radical activists to Beyonce Knowles. Collected here in print for the first time is the essay itself, along with the best of Solnit's feminist writings.

In 1981, Rebecca Solnit rented a studio apartment in San Francisco that would be her home for the next twenty-five years. There, she began to come to terms with the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, and the authority figures that routinely disbelieved her. That violence weighed on her as she faced the task of having a voice in a society that preferred women to shut up or go away.

What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

In this acclaimed exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit travels through Ireland, the land of her long-forgotten maternal ancestors. A Book of Migrations portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism, and tourism. Enriched by cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, A Book of Migrations carves a new route through Ireland’s history, literature, and landscape.

Gifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed three boxes of ripening apricots, which lay, mountainous, on her bedroom floor - a windfall, a riddle, an emergency to be dealt with. The fruit came from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance came stories spun like those of Scheherazade, who used her gifts as a storyteller to change her fate and her listener's heart.

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "[W]ith so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."  

Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle over that foundational power. Women, people of colour and non-straight people are telling other versions, and white men in particular are fighting to preserve their own centrality. In this outstanding collection of essays by one of the most prescient and insightful commentators today, Solnit appraises the voices that are emerging, why they matter and the obstacles they face in making themselves heard.

Rebecca Solnit nos propone con este audiolibro una exploración estimulante del deambular, sobre perderse y abrazar lo desconocido. Creado a modo de serie de ensayos autobiográficos, Solnit se basa en momentos y relaciones destacados en su vida para explorar temas como la...

An energizing case for hope about the climate comes from Rebecca Solnit, called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, and climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, along with a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Not Too Late is the book for anyone who is despondent, defeatist, or unsure about climate change and seeking answers. As the contributors to this volume make clear, the future will be decided by whether we act in the present—and we must act to counter institutional inertia, fossil fuel interests, and political obduracy. T

Después de un desastre, sea provocado por el hombre o por la naturaleza, ¿la gente se vuelve más altruista, ingeniosa y valiente? ¿A qué deben él ánimo las nuevas comunidades que surgen entre las ruinas y en momentos de crisis, con sus nuevos propósitos? ¿Qué revela su alegría sobre la posibilidad y el deseo de cambio social, normalmente insatisfecho? Solnit explora este fenómeno a través de algunas calamidades como el terremoto de 1906 en San Francisco, la explosión que casi acabó con Halifax en 1917, el terremoto de Ciudad de México de 1985, el 11-S en Nueva York y el huracán Katrina, que arrasó Nueva Orleans.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE A “lyrical” (Chicago Tribune) final work of nonfiction from the National Book Award–winning author of Arctic Dreams and Horizon, a literary icon whose writing, fieldwork, and mentorship inspired generations of writers and activists. “Mesmerizing...

Un fascinante retrato de la infinita gama de posibilidades que se presentan a pie. Analizando temas que van desde la evolución anatómica hasta el diseño de las ciudades, pasando por las cintas de correr, los clubes de senderismo y las costumbres sexuales, Solnit sostiene que las diferentes variantes del desplazamiento pedestre—incluido caminar por placer—suponen una acción política, estética y de gran significado social.

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography “An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood “A captivating account of Orwell as...

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent, from the author of Orwell's Roses In...

En 1981, una jovencísima Rebecca Solnit se mudaba a su primer apartamento en un barrio marginal de San Francisco. En él pasaría los siguientes veinticinco años, librando feroces batallas para llevar a cabo la difícil tarea de construir su identidad y tomar la palabra en una sociedad que agrede y silencia a las mujeres.