Product Description

At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable work offers a lucid, affirmative and wildly well-argued case for hope, even in the dark. Tracing a history of activism and social change over the past five decades, Solnit offers a dazzling account of some of the least expected of those changes and proposes a vision of cause-and-effect relations that provides new grounds for political engagement in the present. Chronicling recent breakthroughs - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico to Seattle in 1999 to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq - she traces the rise of a sophisticated, supple, nonviolent movement of movements. Solnit's book is both accessible and essential reading. With a rhetorical verve not seen since Orwell or Sontag, multi-award winning columnist, author and activist, Rebecca Solnit ponders the progression of social change, drawing from thinkers of the last century - Woolf, Ghandi, Borges, Benjamin, Havel amongst others - to create a manifesto for optimism about the twenty-first century, a tonic for post election-blues..

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57301 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
"Seemingly lost in the woods of deceit and banality, bereft of hope, we are confronted by Rebecca Solnit and her astonishing flashlight. In a jewel of a book that is poetic in substance as well as style, she reveals where we were, where we are, and the step-by-step advances that have been made in human rights, as we stubbornly stumble out of the darkness... It surges." Studs Terkel; "In this inspired meditation on the very nature of action and the reasons one thing leads to another, Rebecca Solnit, with her customary intellectual penetration, freshness of expression, and high elegance, finds new springs of hope in dark times." Jonathan Schell; "Solnit writes with an engaging and literate passion." Independent (on Motion Studies)"