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The Faraway Nearby (ALA Notable Books for Adults) by [Solnit, Rebecca]

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The Faraway Nearby (ALA Notable Books for Adults) Kindle Edition

by Rebecca Solnit (Author)

76 customer reviews

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From the author of Men Explain Things to Me, a personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy – a fitting companion to Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

In this exquisitely written book by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self. Woven together, these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and territories of storytelling, reframing who each of us is and how we might tell our story.

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Length: 271 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Product details

File Size: 1124 KB
Print Length: 271 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (June 13, 2013)
Publication Date: June 13, 2013
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B00AFPVO5K
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

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Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported

Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #284,827 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #665 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
- #1578 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Women
- #2451 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors

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Amelia Gremelspacher

"Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them"

June 13, 2013

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The Huffington Press has chosen this lilting book as the book they are "talking about this week.". It will certainly haunt me. The story that launches her current book is the loss of her mother to Alzheimer's, step by awful step. In her attempt to frame this reality, she nests the narratives that her mother has told herself and her own responsive attempts to organize reality. Her mother had not been a warm, or often even kind.

With a deft hand, Solnit weaves the doors and windows through which she travels into a mesmerizing story. As a child, she was a solitary person, but found that " books are solitudes in which we meet." ( possibly my favorite sentence in the book.). She shares the stories that have helped her to shape her own life and have in turn inspired her own writings. She had decided early on to never refuse an adventure, and she shares a few she had taken as relief and growth as the burden of her mother grew.

Solnit also speaks of the ways in which our interior dialogues can trap us. They can tell us who to love or hate. "Not a few stories are sinking ships." She believes among these tales are the ones that stiffened and distanced her mother into jealousy and aloofness. Somehow, the author successfully weaves the story of Frankenstein and the history of his creator into a meaningful, and even necessary, part of her own discourse. Along the way, Solnit goes to the "country where many go much further and some don't return." She has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

This is a literate book for the reader who loves a well crafted work. It is thoughtful, insightful, and even funny. It challenges the reader to evaluate one's own internal script and to open for the constant change of every context. This is a book that fills the promise of solitudes meeting.

91 people found this helpful

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Dr. Richard M. Waugaman

Ring Composition in Action!

March 8, 2015

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

One intriguing feature of the book that I have not seen mentioned in other reviews is its use of "ring composition." This is a pattern in epics throughout the ancient world, where the central message is found at the center, and the rest of the book constitutes two symmetrical halves that mirror each other. Solnit announces this structure in the Table of Contents, where the chapter titles in the first half are echoed in reverse order in the second half.

The only unique chapter title is at the center-- "Knots." The chapters just before and just after the central one are titled "Wound" and "Unwound," respectively. At the center of the central chapter, where ring composition tells us we will find the key theme, Solnit writes of "cyclical time" influencing the spinning of a tale.

We can enjoy her book even if we do not notice this structure. But I'm delighted to see such a clear instance of a pattern described in ancient literature by an anthropologist, Mary Douglas, in Thinking in Circles.
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Circles-Essay-Composition-Lectures/dp/0300167857/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425860268&sr=8-1&keywords=thinking+in+circles+an+essay+on+ring+composition

8 people found this helpful

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PracAdemic

Great book of essays, disappointing as a memoir.

December 30, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I'm a big fan of RS's essays and well aware she can write circles around most people. I found this book disappointing in that it felt like she used three traumatic events (her mother's descent into Alzheimers, her own preventative breast surgery, and the end of a long relationship) as a jumping off point for very learned and engaging, but quite impersonal, essays. She strikes me as someone who would welcome you into her house with the warmest of smiles, but then use stories in the most beguiling of ways, to keep you at a good, safe emotional distance.

3 people found this helpful

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Stephen Persing

Pain and pleasure

June 24, 2013

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This book was billed in advance as similar to Solnit's book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, but that is misleading. This book touches on more pain, and the threads that run through it tie the book together more completely as a whole instead of a collection of essays. I liked both books, but The Faraway Nearby feels a little more mature in its acknowledgment of the sorrows and hardships of life. As always, Rebecca Solnit writes with inspired prose that seems always on the edge of becoming poetry. A marvelous book.

36 people found this helpful

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