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Rebecca Solnit

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A Field Guide to Getting Lost Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition

by Rebecca Solnit (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 1,143 ratings

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“An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” —Los Angeles Times

From the award-winning author of Orwell's Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown

Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.

From Publishers Weekly

The virtues of being open to new and transformative experiences are rhapsodized but not really illuminated in this discursive and somewhat gauzy set of linked essays. Cultural historian Solnit, an NBCC award winner for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, allows the subject of getting lost to lead her where it will, from early American captivity narratives to the avant-garde artist Yves Klein. She interlaces personal and familial histories of disorientation and reinvention, writing of her Russian Jewish forebears' arrival in the New World, her experiences driving around the American west and listening to country music, and her youthful immersion in the punk rock demimonde. Unfortunately, the conceit of embracing the unknown is not enough to impart thematic unity to these essays; one piece ties together the author's love affair with a reclusive man, desert fauna, Hitchcock's Vertigo and the blind seer Tiresias in ways that will indeed leave readers feeling lost. Solnit's writing is as abstract and intangible as her subject, veering between oceanic lyricism ("Blue is the color of longing for the distance you never arrive in") and pensées about the limitations of human understanding ("Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map's information is what's left out, the unmapped and unmappable") that seem profound but are actually banal once you think about them.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From The New Yorker

This meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting lost is-as befits its subject-less a coherent argument than a series of peregrinations, leading the reader to unexpected vistas. The word "lost," Solnit informs us, derives from the Old Norse for disbanding an army, and she extrapolates from this the idea of striking "a truce with the wide world." It's the wideness of the world that entices: a map of this deceptively slender volume would include hermit crabs, who live in scavenged shells; marauding conquistadors; an immigrant grandmother committed to an asylum; white frontier children kidnapped by Indians; and Hitchcock's "Vertigo." Solnit imagines a long-distance runner accumulating moments when neither foot is on the ground, "tiny fragments of levitation," and argues, by analogy, that in relinquishing certainty we approach, if only fleetingly, the divine.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

Solnit is who Susan Sontag might have become if Sontag had never forsaken California for Manhattan. -- San Francisco Chronicle --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Rebecca Solnit is the author of fourteen books, including A Paradise Built in Hell, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Back Cover

"A meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting lost"
The New Yorker

"This indispensable California writers most personal book yet."
San Francisco Chronicle

"An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism . . . a book to set you wandering down strangely fruitful trails of thought."
Los Angeles Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Booklist

One can literally get lost in a city or the wilderness, or one can lose one's self, one's memories, one's spiritual grounding, one's way through the labyrinth of love. And by getting lost, much can be found. Lannan Award winner Solnit, a penetrating cultural historian, has written books about landscape, the wild, art, and activism. Here she ponders the Zen of getting lost in a lithesome essay collection. Using the evocative color blue as a polestar, she roams from her roots in Bialystok to the Great Salt Lake and beyond, entwining autobiography with musings on exile, how photographs both create and displace memories, captivity narratives, urban ruins, music, the death of a friend, the "deterioration of the local," and the brief, bright life of artist Yves Klein. Solnit not only thinks innovatively and writes beautifully, she also trips the wire in the mind that hushes the static of routine concerns and allows readers to perceive hidden aspects of life, thus opening up new inner vistas for us to explore, even to the point of getting blissfully lost. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ISBN-13

978-0143037248
Edition

Reprint
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

June 27, 2006
Language

English
File size

5264 KB
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002GOP9FY
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (June 27, 2006)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 27, 2006
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5264 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 225 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #100,997 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #54 in Travel Writing
- #67 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #85 in Artist & Architect Biographies

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4.3 1,143 ratings

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Rebecca Solnit

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Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of seventeen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including the updated and reissued Hope in the Dark, three atlases, of San Francisco in 2010, New Orleans in 2013, and New York forthcoming in October; 2014's Men Explain Things to Me; 2013's The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and frequent contributor to the Guardian newspaper.

She encourages you to shop at Indiebound, your local independent bookstore, Powells.com, Barnes & Noble online and kind of has some large problems with how Amazon operates these days. Though she's grateful if you're buying her books here or anywhere....

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Maika

Poignant, beautiful, & full of appreciation for the natural world & our ephemeral place in it

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2019

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Little did I know that this book would be the perfect follow up to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which I read last month. Together they’d form a beautiful Venn diagram made solely of different shades of blue. This is my first foray into the writing of Rebecca Solnit – poignant and beautiful, and full of appreciation for the natural world and our ephemeral place in it – and I’m now hooked. In this book Solnit explores the different ways in which a person can get lost, both physically and psychologically, the power of wandering and of deliberately shedding or simply losing one’s sense of place, and the inestimable value of the unknown. In addition to overlapping themes regarding the color blue, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and Bluets are poetic kindred in their heady interweaving of history, art, philosophy, and personal memoir. Just as with Bluets, I found frequently myself marking passages so that I might easily find them again later.

“There is a voluptuous pleasure in all that sadness, and I wonder where it comes from, because as we usually construe the world, sadness and pleasure should be far apart. Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn’t fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depth of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?”

And one more because I can’t help myself:

“The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion.”

48 people found this helpful

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Jimmy Neenan

Into the Blue

Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2015

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The social perception of loss is denotatively and connotatively negative. It's a word we associate with the agonies of death, the frustrations of deprivation, and the erosion of what was into what is not.

To lose is to succumb to the fate that awaits us all--the diminutive sense of depletion and reduction. Solnit, though, disagrees. In her stunning collection of essays that make up A Field Guide to Getting Lost, for Solnit, loss is a transformative force, rather than a negative one--a powerful impetus for change that moves into the world of the liminal--the spaces between moments rather than the spaces that constitute moments.

Relying on notable figures ranging in discipline and trade from Henry Thoreau, Conquistador Cabeza de Vaca, and Parisian performance artist and judo extraordinaire Yves Klein to pull her through from a state of solidity to that of the fluid, that of the blue itself--Solnit walks us through landscapes and worlds that are altogether foreign and exotic, to strangely convey the most familiar landscape of all--change.

Solnit alternates between the constant imagery of the solid, the grounded, the ideas that allow us to plant ourselves in the constant--only to transition into that of the "blue"--that of the ethereal and atmospheric, that of the liminal. Every other essay is titled: "The Blue of Distance" allowing for discussion of the philosophical means of the color blue as an aesthetic principle and metaphor of fluidity--the intent of which is to bring us into the space between relinquishment and acquisition--giving and taking.

More than a simple collection of essays, where Solnit succeeds is in the connection to the personal. We create ourselves through our association with others, picking and choosing tidbits of cultural ephemera we deem appropriate to absorb into our own lives--to make our own--making Solnit's viewpoint wholly relatable. She almost takes the form of overt autobiography. Association with Solnit's points becomes inherent.

Although, the collection seems sporadic at times--the essays jump and move and transition like a child hopping from puddle to puddle mid-rain storm--hence the exploratory milieu, making the readability erratic. A singular essay can cover topics ranging in breadth from her own home life, the world of the Conquistador and pre-colonial United States, to the diminishing microbes of our environment, and the death of the desert tortoise. It's fascinating and intriguing, but at times comes across disjointed.

Nevertheless, A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a philosophical treatise on the idea of flux--the essence of the middle, and the spaces between places in which our bodies and psyches transition to worlds and climes that are foreign and beautiful. The book is a success in that it reminds us, yet again, that the only constant in life is change.

For more great book reviews, see bookguyreview.com

26 people found this helpful

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Veronica S.

Definitely learned how to get lost

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2023

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Got lost in her words and in the landscapes (environmental, mental and emotional) that she shares. Give yourself a chance to be lost and found.

One person found this helpful

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Lois Requist

Mixed review

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2018

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My book club read this book and discussed it last night. A couple of people liked it immensely, while others just couldn't get through it. All agreed there were lovely passages. A book that doesn't have a story arc, a character study, or even an essay format that begins somewhere and the end results from that beginning, is challenging. Many of us got lost in the reading and thought that was perhaps what the author intended.
As one person said, if someone asked me what it's about, I couldn't say.
Still, there's something to getting lost, and I appreciate that.

36 people found this helpful

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Faff

Great!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 3, 2023

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Great!

CGG

Unique

Reviewed in Mexico on January 20, 2020

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Great read!

Kindle Customer

Soulful and heartwarming

Reviewed in India on May 17, 2020

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This book took me to many beautiful places in my own mind. There are many passages that just move you with the deep human-ess of it all. It's as much as about getting lost as it's about finding your lost self. Solnit's writing takes you out of the world and brings you home; not always in that order. It asks of you to dare to let go, embrace awareness and court adventure.

さくら

難しすぎた。

Reviewed in Japan on April 18, 2017

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Wander Societyを読んだ後、その中に参考になる書籍として挙げられていたので購入したが、自分には難しくて途中でギブアップした。
自分の語彙の貧しさももちろんだが、考え方の根柢の部分をよく理解できていなかったかもしれない。

2 people found this helpful

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Peter

A delight.

Reviewed in Canada on June 1, 2015

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Now, really, I loved this book. I loved it so much I gave a speech about it. I told my friends and my family about it. This particular review comes on the back of my buying it for a friend and having it delivered to his home. It's an elegantly written thing, in my opinion, with well-researched, insightful observations about human existence and the notions of finding ones self. I love it. But not everyone does. The language is of a higher level than most. Some people I know have found it hard to follow. But for my part, I am hoping that senility sets in, such that I forgot every page of it, so that I can pick it up off the shelf and do it all over again. Brilliant.

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