Rebecca Solnit

Bestselling author Rebecca Solnit reminds us that activism has changed the world in remarkable ways.

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Hope in the Dark

Ri Liu

Originally written in the early 2000s, the events that inspired this book are well in the past and arguably we have sunk deeper into the despair that Solnit is trying to pull us up out of. It's a bit jarring to read about the Bush era, 9/11 in the context of 2020, but when you look past these things to the general themes, momentum of protest movements, there is still some stuff there to help us through these darker times.

I resonate more with this type of appeal to positivity, in contrast with the other type which falls at the alter of the enlightenment (Pinker etc). We are right in our feeling of being unsettled, we shouldn't just shut up and be grateful for all this 'progress', but on the flip-side, the defeatism that is becoming more prevalent is not helping the cause. We can still dream big, just not collapse in defeat when we don't get that all-or-nothing response.

I like the way she presented the idea of being unsettled in the margins, I think more and more of us are in that space now, increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo. I like the idea that everything is still in motion, when things seem so sunken in, dark and static if you pay any attention to the news cycle. It's hard to know where the push and pull of history will take us, and there is some comfort in that at least.

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

Rebeca Keren Nuñez

Un libro para esos momentos en donde uno pierde la fe en la humanidad. Muy interesante y creo que esta al alcance de la comprensión de cualquiera. Para volver a leer cada tanto.

Throwing out the crippling assumptions with which many activists proceed, award-winning author Solnit proposes a new vision of how change happens.

The Untold History of People Power

Virginia Su

This was a short but dense essay collection covering a wide range of topics concerning activism. The presence or the lack of hope was a central theme in a lot of the essays, but I found the overall tone of the essays to be optimistic. I also saw many, many parallels in the discussion Solnit starts on the Bush administration with the current DJT administration, which made this book even more absorbable. It was pretty dense in material though, and because I listened to it on an audiobook, I feel like I may need to review a paper copy to really see the intricacies of the essays (which I just picked up from the library).

Michael Hessling

Outstanding. Gave me hope, of course.

Doesn't say anything about 45, but it's there. I do wish there was more about *what* to do, and that's something I'm going to find out.

Juliana

Joylyn yang

Nica Rhiana

Parv

Lindsy Rice

At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable work offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope. This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades - from the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq. Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. Tracing the footsteps of the last century's thinkers - including Woolf, Gandhi, Borges, Benjamin and Havel - Solnit conjures a timeless vision of cause and effect that will light our way through the dark, and lead us to profound and effective political engagement.

Celina Gacias

kate

Ilse van der Hout

rockie

Shameera Nair Lin

Mallory Foutch

Maggie Delano

Kevan Lee

Anna Kulwikowska

When the first edition of Hope in the Dark was published in mid-2004 it gained an instant cult audience. Many readers were so inspired by Solnit's book that they bought multiple copies to give to friends. This new, significantly expanded edition covers, among other things, the political territory of America and the world after George Bush's re-election. Acclaimed author Rebecca Solnit draws on her life as a writer and activist, on the events of our moment, on our deepest past, to argue for hope—hope even in the dark. Solnit reminds us of how changed the world has been by the activism of the past five decades. Offering a dazzling account of some of the least expected of those changes, she proposes a vision of cause-and-effect relations that provides new grounds for political engagement in the present. Counting historic victories—from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Zapatista uprising to Seattle in 1999 to the worldwide marches against war in Iraq to Cancun in September 2003—she traces the rise of a sophisticated, supple, nonviolent new movement that unites all the diverse and fragmentary issues of the eighties and nineties in our new century.

Hope in the Dark Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

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