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Rebecca Solnit

A Field Guide to Getting Lost Hardcover – July 7, 2005

by Rebecca Solnit (Author)

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A series of autobiographical essays draws on key moments and relationships in the author's life to explore such issues as trust, loss, and desire, in a volume that focuses on a central theme of losing oneself in the pleasures of experience. By the author of River of Shadows and Wanderlust. 25,000 first printing.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Viking Adult
Publication date

July 7, 2005
Dimensions

5.76 x 0.88 x 8.52 inches
ISBN-10

0670034215
ISBN-13

978-0670034215
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73 offers from $5.20
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Editorial Reviews

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.

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

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking Adult (July 7, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0670034215
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0670034215
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.76 x 0.88 x 8.52 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #484,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #830 in Artist & Architect Biographies
- #1,369 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- #17,021 in Memoirs (Books)

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664 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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Katharina Korbjuhn

Rebecca Solnit is the queen

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 16, 2022

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I continue to get this as a gift for all of my friends

One person 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.

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18 people found this helpful

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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.”

34 people found this helpful

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David Thomas

A mindful study of the power of getting lost

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 28, 2015

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The root of the word, 'lost', is the Old English 'losian', to perish. Today, it carries some of that association, but more often means that we simply do not know where we are. Of course, many explorers have died knowing exactly where they were, some in circumstances readily manageable by locals. On the other hand, many pioneers settling in the wilderness and largely ignorant of where they were in the world, lived long and thrived. There is a second sense of the word 'lost' as being without direction or guidance--the 'lost generation.' I find that Ms. Solnit's essay bridges these two meanings of the word to bring a brighter context to being lost. Being lost is an opportunity to create new connections to place and people, to expand our existing map beyond its anxious margins. As ignorance is the starting place of learning, being lost is the starting place of finding oneself in the world. I think for those who like to travel, this book may offer reasons and caveats for allowing oneself to get lost, to wander off the tour, and expand their maps of the known world.

28 people found this helpful

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Susan Stepney

a variety of ways to get lost

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 1, 2020

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I read somewhere once that we are the last generation who will ever get lost, as GPS-equipped phones make that experience a thing of the past. Instead, I believe we may be the last generation who will know where we are, relative to other places, as opposed to being forever simply “here”.

Solnit sees getting, and being, lost not as a problem, but as a pleasure, or opportunity for growth, or something to be learned from. In a series of chapters, she explores a variety of ways to get lost – spatially, in our thinking, in our memories – or to lose something or someone. The chapters themselves articulately meander through a variety of ideas, then, just when you wonder if Solnit has herself lost her train of thought, she ties up the topic with insight and wit.

10 people found this helpful

Brita Fernandez Schmidt

Breathtakingly beautiful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 4, 2020

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One of my favourite books ever! Rebecca Solnit writes so beautifully about what we so often think is the worst... getting lost ... only to discover that it is in fact what we should be striving for... I absolutely loved this book - I got lost in it and loved where I found myself! Thank you Rebecca for writing such a wonderful piece of art!

5 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer

Fascinating but not an easy journey

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 5, 2016

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This is not an easy book to read. It rambles from subject to subject, some interesting, some not so. It is occasionally a great tug on the emotions. The overall concept of the book, the art of getting lost both mentally and physically is fascinating. It is well worth reading but it is not an easy ride.

17 people found this helpful

Mark Hayward

Worth devoting a rainy afternoon to.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 3, 2017

Verified Purchase

Somewhat peculiar. However, this contains some stimulating writing about getting lost geographically and metaphorically. I have annotated some pages to return to an ponder upon. Worth devoting a rainy afternoon to.

8 people found this helpful

Partial Mind

Style over substance?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 30, 2021

Verified Purchase

A loose thread of “lost” is overworked in what is essentially a self focussed morsel. Sure some elegant passages but that isn’t matched by a convincing design. My first and last Solnit....

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A Field Guide to Getting Lost Hardcover – July 7, 2005

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