Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

by Rebecca Solnit

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520256565
• ISBN13: 9780520256569
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 436 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Trademark intelligence and eloquence, now in essay form

A friend who said he was reminded of Joan Didion by these essays only made clear to me how much more there is to Solnit: one of the most gifted writers we have, for one thing, who brings to bear sensitivities to political questions, her own personal interactions with the environment, historical and philosophic musings, at the same time researching her topics and presenting pertinent and sometimes obscure facts with a casualness that belies the rigor that must have gone into their research. Readers new to Solnit might be steered first to her celebrated classic, "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West," but these essays sacrifice none of the intellectual reach and sweep of that earlier work. Some are slightly dated, as might be predicted from their topicality, but all are well enough written to maintain interest as snippets out of time. I particularly enjoyed one in which, having invited Solnit to visit, Susan Sontag seemed to welcome her "into the republic of literature;" in another, Solnit makes a breathtaking connection between the bikini waxes of Playboy bunnies and clear-cutting in the Sequoia National forest--and makes a pertinent point of it. I'm not especially driven to read about the ingenious ways rapacious corporations have skirted laws and ethics to plunder the American landscape, still less about our own disregard; but Solnit makes interesting not only those subjects but many others in this volume. Each essay is an example of a wonderful writer plying her craft, a reflective citizen and highly cultivated mind never so self-indulgent as to forego hard information that you've never heard before, historical facts that have been overlooked or suppressed. I suspect that some of these essays will be classics fifty years hence. In the meantime, enjoy the literary champagne, even as you become better informed citizens of this, our beleaguered planet.