Reviews
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
