By Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of traveling into tricky territory and reporting again, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public highbrow. Storming the Gates of Paradise, an anthology of her crucial essays from the prior ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.--Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the private mines, and from the antislavery struggles of 2 hundred years in the past to today’s road protests. The approximately 40 essays accumulated right here contain a different guidebook to the yankee panorama after the millennium—not simply the deserts, skies, gardens, and desolate tract parts that experience lengthy made up Solnit’s subject material, however the social panorama of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests. She ventures into territories as darkish as criminal and as chic as a extensive vista, revealing attractiveness within the most harsh panorama and political fight within the such a lot it sounds as if serene view. Her advent units the tone and the book’s overarching topics as she describes Thoreau, leaving the prison mobile the place he were restricted for refusing to pay battle taxes and continuing on to his favourite huckleberry patch. during this means she hyperlinks excitement to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the trail to paradise has frequently run via prison.
These startling insights on present affairs, politics, tradition, and heritage, constantly expressed in Solnit’s pellucid and sleek prose, consistently revise our perspectives of the in a different way usual and time-honored. Illustrated all through, Storming the Gates of Paradise represents fresh advancements in Solnit’s considering and gives the reader a breathtaking international view enriched through her often provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.