by Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
5/13/2025, paperback
SKU: 9798888903636
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In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.
Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.
"I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take," Solnit writes in the introduction, "the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past."
Reviews:
"This is a book of fierce and poetic thinking--and a guide for navigating a rapidly changing, non-linear, living world." -- Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life
"Rebecca Solnit is a national literary treasure: a passionate, close-to-the-ground reporter with the soul and voice of a philosopher-poet." -- Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost
"Solnit's writing is prose poetry and truly beautiful, her thoughts always exploratory and full of curiosity and wonder, the antithesis of dogma, so that it is impossible not to be carried along on her offbeat philosophical detours." -- The Guardian
About the Author:
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell's Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and the advisory boards of Dayenu and Third Act.