Review by Booklist Review
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 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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 pens?es 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. Agent, Bonnie Nadell at Frederick Hill Assoc. (July 11) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Solnit is an activist and cultural historian with an impressive literary background, having written Wanderlust: A History of Walking and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Her latest mixes memories and storytelling in nine essays that take us through Solnit's life at different stages; the hodgepodge of her experiences creates a backdrop for topics ranging from her family and childhood to music, politics, culture, and movies. In "Daisy Chains," for example, Solnit writes about her family history and what makes it mysterious, suggesting that she became a historian in part because she had no history of her own and wanted to "tell the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity." The essay also provides details about the fate of Solnit's grandmother and great-grandmother, women whom Solnit describes as having disappeared both physically and emotionally from the lives of those around them. Though engaging and introspective, this book has quite a bit going on and might overwhelm readers at times. Solnit grounds each essay in her personal experiences, but her style requires close attention, concentration, and reflection in a way that can be tedious. Still, appropriate for most collections.-Valeda Dent, Hunter Coll. Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: "field guide" shouldn't be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit's essays have the same title, "The Blue of Distance," but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don't ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit's immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author's explorations of loss, losing and being lost. Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
