Rebecca Solnit offers an account of the breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.
Slim but powerful ... Solnit writes with moral clarity and philosophical vigor, in a voice that jumps off the page and into the reader’s consciousness. Like so many great essayists, she has a gift for conveying rich ideas in language that aims for inclusivity.
Pushes back on the current political gloom ... Solnit’s book is not a polemical manifesto. It is a brilliant short history of our immediate past, showing how everything — from the environment to the cells in our body — is connected ... Solnit weaves a remarkable tapestry, connecting apparently disparate thinkers, activists and ideas in concluding that 'we face the past to remember, we face the future to dream' ... Offers us hope of the intellect and the will.
Remarkably lucid and fluent ... The through line here is the recognition that everything and all of us are interconnected. Solnit’s holistic anatomy of the dynamics of change is precise, compelling, and deeply clarifying.
