Review by Booklist Review
Solnit is ever-attentive to the key issues of the day, ever-diligent in gleaning insights from the past, and ever-creative in her analysis and expression. As she gathered recent essays for her latest collection, she noted that many of them map how change for the better often happens along the edges, its path "circuitous," its pace slow, hence the book's title. Solnit ponders the ongoing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the complex repercussions of the Dobbs decision on reproductive rights and people's lives. As a longtime resident of San Francisco, she offers a piercing look at how the tech industry changed that city, an astute, eye-opening account that extends to the global impact of high-tech and the mammoth wealth and power of tech titans. Solnit considers wildfires, droughts, floods, and the climate crisis. Though these engrossing thought pieces were written before the second Trump administration, they ring with renewed relevance: "Appeasement didn't work in the 1930s, and it won't work now," she writes. Also: "This is a time when the baseline is slipping, when we risk forgetting what used to be and accept the chaos and devastation replacing it." Solnit also shares wonder and hope as she ponders the resonance of fairy tales, the marvels of a three-hundred-year-old violin, the key role aunts play in families, the often-obscured success of renewable energy, and the "moral beauty" experienced during crises when "what matters most" is revealed. Original, lucid, and ardent, Solnit is an essential observer and interpreter of our most confounding predicaments.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Solnit (Not Too Late) urges readers to accept that progress may not be quick or linear in this impassioned if tedious essay collection. Labeling herself "a tortoise at the mayfly party," Solnit draws on her years of activism to describe "watching the slow journey of ideas from the margins to the center" and coming to realize that what seems like a setback may actually be essential movement toward change. She illustrates this point through reflections on a range of issues, including climate change and feminism. She has a few incisive moments, among them her critiques of "unbiased" centrism--which obfuscates "the ugliest... prejudices"--and of Silicon Valley's "above the law" billionaires. At other times, however, Solnit leans into a fanciful whimsy that grates, musing on "Anthropocene instruments" made from "trees whose voices have changed" with the climate, and offering head-scratcher proclamations ("Familiarity is a life raft or some floating trash... the task isn't to bellyflop onto the flotsam; it's to swim"). Even so, she makes a convincing case that doomerism can be defeated by offering better "theories of change" that demonstrate how "our actions... matter" in shaping history--a well-conceived thesis that she unfortunately repeats to eye-glazing effect. It's a plodding call to action that will have readers hoping for a less tiresome route. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The hard work of making a better future. Readers seeking reasons for hope in tumultuous times will find many in the latest from the author ofMen Explain Things to Me. Solnit's essays about climate change, toxic masculinity, income inequality, and other subjects are paeans to "patience, endurance, and long-term vision," which she believes are essential to lasting political change. Solnit is a deft connector of historical dots. In one inspired essay, she demonstrates how 21st-century activists organized durable movements that moved centrist politicians toward progressive remedies on problems as varied as water usage and debt relief. Occupy Wall Street, launched in 2011, recognized that theirs would be a protracted fight, one that yielded tangible results in the 2020s, when politicians launched student loan forgiveness initiatives. More than two centuries ago, Solnit notes, John Adams detected a not dissimilar chain of events, writing that the American Revolution "was effected from 1760 to 1775." Solnit describes climate change as "a moral crisis" and "a storytelling crisis." Cynics may chuckle when she quotes a climate writer who says that "what we desperately need is more artists" to help create "a new world," but Solnit offers a galvanizing vision for healing the planet, one that prizes community over material goods. A more humane definition of wealth, she writes, would foreground enriching relationships with nature and friends. This isn't an autobiographical book, but the personal details Solnit shares suggest a very interesting person. She was "an antinuclear activist" and counts among her friends a death row inmate, a mushroom collector, and a violin maker. The latter appears in the book's warmest essay, about the durability of a 300-year-old violin still played by a prominent musician. Fittingly, the instrument is "both a relic and a promise." A buoyant, historically astute appreciation of political persistence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
