Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics [Hardcover]

Rebecca Solnit (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These provocative essays by National Book Critics Circle award–winner Solnit (Wanderlust, etc.), mostly published in magazines like the London Review of Books and Sierra and in books by other authors over the past seven years, attempts to understand politics through place. Her meditations often begin with landscape, but for her, "to be in the woods is not to be out of society or politics." She goes far beyond pristine nature, as she considers the mythology of the American West, ponders Silicon Valley—which she calls "a non-place"—and muses about antiglobalization protest sites in California and Miami. The impediments people use to keep strangers out of their gardens distress her, as do barriers that would seal the U.S. off from the rest of the world. She celebrates vibrant public spaces, laments malls and rails against the displacement of Asher Durand's painting Kindred Spirits from New York City to Arkansas, by a Wal-Mart heiress whose fortune is built on a philosophy antithetical to that of the painting. Activists and idealists Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs and Betty Friedan, and the visionary architect Teddy Cruz give her hope. Always insightful, these essays offer many shrewd observations about the social, political and cultural landscape of contemporary America. Photos not seen by PW.
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From Booklist

For Solnit, walking the earth, placing words on a page, and standing up for her beliefs are symbiotic acts. Following in the footsteps of her guiding light, Henry David Thoreau, Solnit contemplates our sense of place, an ever-shifting mix of nature and culture. The author of 10 books, each a remarkably incisive blend of history and interpretation, Solnit, a global justice activist, now presents a potent collection of nearly 40 essays sophisticated in thought, elegant in expression, and catalyzing in impact. Solnit's anchoring place is Nevada, the site of the detonation of hundreds of nuclear bombs and countless battles over land, water, and the disposal of nuclear waste. Radiating out from this blasted epicenter, Solnit considers the fate of Native Americans, the fallout from the often overlooked Mexican-American War, and the enormous influence of computer technology. Reflections on such seminal creators as Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Eliot Porter yield surprising treasures. And underlying all is Solnit's quest for understanding how our dream of paradise has failed to keep us from ravaging the planet. Seaman, Donna
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 429 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (June 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520251091
• ISBN-13: 978-0520251090
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #979,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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....

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trademark intelligence and eloquence, now in essay form, December 11, 2007

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Bartolo (New York City, New York USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Hardcover)

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.