Bøker av Rebecca Solnit

Solnit's revelatory modern classic exploring philosophy, history, art and metaphysics

This updated edition confirms Solnit's seminal work as a timeless classic on politics and change

The author of Men Explain Things to Me explores the moments of altruism and generosity that arise in the aftermath of disaster Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities? In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

What makes a place? This title searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. It explores the area thematically - connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge's foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock's filming of "Vertigo".

Feminist essays for the #MeToo era from ';the voice of the resistance,' the international bestselling author of Men Explain Things to Me (The New York Times Magazine). Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are. Praise for Rebecca Solnit and her essays ';Rebecca Solnit is essential feminist reading.' The New Republic ';In these times of political turbulence and an increasingly rabid and scrofulous commentariat, the sanity, wisdom and clarity of Rebecca Solnit's writing is a forceful corrective. Whose Story Is This? is a scorchingly intelligent collection about the struggle to control narratives in the internet age.' The Guardian ';Solnit's passionate, shrewd, and hopeful critiques are a road map for positive change.' Kirkus Reviews ';Solnit's exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy.' Elle ';Rebecca Solnit reasserts herself here as one of the most astute cultural critics in progressive discourse.' Publishers Weekly ';No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium.' Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org

'She looked like a girl who was evening, and an evening that had become a girl...'In the kitchen, in her rags, Cinderella, longs to go to the ball. Cinderella's transformation turns out to be much less about ballgowns, glass slippers and carriages, and much more about finding her truest self.

Explore the hidden histories of San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York with this brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas. Each atlas provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of a city as experienced by its different inhabitants, replete with the celebrations and contradictions that make up urban life.

Reporting from the front line of gentrification in San Fransisco's Mission District, The author draws on architectural history, urban studies and the images of photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, to project the end of city life for bohemians and its baleful consequences for American culture.

Part of a trilogy of atlases, this title conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey.

"e;A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book."e;-Larry McMurtryIn 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants. A century later-in 1951-and a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a nuclear testing program, but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin.In this foundational book of landscape theory and environmental thinking, Rebecca Solnit explores our national Eden and Armageddon and offers a pathbreaking history of the west, focusing on the relationship between culture and its implementation as politics. In a new preface, she considers the continuities and changes of these invisible wars in the context of our current climate change crisis, and reveals how the long arm of these histories continue to inspire her writing and hope.

Features an essay on the events surrounding and following the 1906 earthquake. This book also includes a lyrical essay that considers the meaning of ruins, resurrection, and the evolving geography and history of San Francisco.

Looks at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, this title plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.

Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual. Storming the Gates of Paradise, an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.--Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to today's street protests. The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millennium-not just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnit's subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests. She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view. Her introduction sets the tone and the book's overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch. In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison.These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnit's pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar. Illustrated throughout, Storming the Gates of Paradise represents recent developments in Solnit's thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.

Portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Enriched by cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, this title carves a route through Ireland's history, literature and landscape.

Giving a portrait of the age of high speed innovation, this is a biography of Eadweard Muybridge, the Englishman who invented motion picture technology.