Strangely positioned between Europe and the post-colonial world, Ireland occupies a fluid and contradictory space, not least in the memory or imagination of its many emigrants. In this exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit returns to Ireland, armed with a newly-acquired passport - courtesy of otherwise forgotten maternal ancestors. Her journey is not to find a stable identity in ancestral roots, but to confront notions of stability, identity, ethnicity and nationalism in one of their great mythic sources. The book is a post-colonical revision of conventional travel literature. In her passage through Ireland, Rebecca portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Travel itself produces its own versions of memory and identity, and travel's transformation into the information age's pre-eminent industry - tourism - comes under close scrutiny. It is no accident that her journey culminates in an encounter with the Travellers, the indigenous nomads of contemporary Ireland. Using cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, the book carves a new route through Ireland's history, literature and landscape. It contains historical reflections on Roger Casement and Jonathan Swift, the Dublin Natural History Museum and the disappearance of Ireland's forests.
San Francisco writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books about art, landscape, community, ecology, politics, hope, and memory. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she has worked with Native American land rights, antinuclear, human rights, antiwar and other issues as an activist and journalist.
Her new book is a departure from the previous 12 solo projects, a tall book of 22 colorful maps and 19 essays titled Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, made with 27 artists, writers, and cartographers.
She shops regularly at Amazon for books she can't get at her local independent bookstores, but she loves the local independents, frequents them constantly, particularly the Green Arcade and City Lights. She is very grateful to her readers, for writers are nothing without readers and books are dormant treasures that come alive when they're open and read; they live inside your head....
