Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.
In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.
The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.
While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.
-
"[Hope in the Dark offers] An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways."
—The New Yorker
“[Rebecca Solnit is] the voice of the resistance”
—The New York Times
“[N]o writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than Rebecca Solnit.”
—Maria Popova
“[Hope in the Dark is] One of the Best Books of the 21st Century.”
—The Guardian
“Solnit's writing is prose poetry and truly beautiful, her thoughts always exploratory and full of curiosity and wonder, the antithesis of dogma.”
—The Guardian
Other books by Rebecca Solnit
-
No Straight Road Takes You There
-
Not Too Late
Edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua -
Waking Beauty
-
City of Women London Tube Wall Map (A2, 16.5 x 23.4 Inches)
by Reni Eddo-Lodge, Rebecca Solnit, et al. -
City of Women New York City Subway Wall Map (20 x 20 Inches)