MixedCleveland Review of BooksAlthough she communicates a palpable longing for her years of apprenticeship, during which she had time and space to grow, the way Solnit expresses her nostalgia often feels unproductively sentimental. What’s strange about the book, given her reputation as a deft and fearless miner of her own experience, is the way it seems to lack any exploration of ambivalence; Solnit gives us a complete, picture-perfect vision of her development as an artist, one that moves smoothly from one period to the next. There’s no sense of her exploring her own ideas in the moment; we aren’t given the conflicts of youth coming to understand itself and its own contradictions. Instead, the finished product of Solnit today—a celebrity feminist—seems to be reading back into her past a cohesiveness that couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, have been there at the time ... What Solnit gives us is ultimately a thin, singular vision of her past, one that does not adequately address the complicated intersections between power, race, gender, and sexuality one would expect her to grasp intuitively, because she doesn\'t give us an exploration of a larger community beyond her own identity.
