Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this ardent yet repetitive essay collection, author and activist Solnit (No Straight Road Takes You There) argues that social progress, while not always immediate or linear, is still occurring. Explaining that change is "invisible" over longer stretches of time, once the "baseline" has been forgotten, the author recaps the significant social advancements of the past several decades, including civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ equality, and the environmental movement. Along the way, she highlights the profound evolutions taking place within each issue. The fight for Indigenous rights and recognition, for example, has in recent years seen major strides forward, with federal lands being restored to tribal ownership and rapidly spreading public awareness that depicting Native Americans as "vanished, faded away, extinct" is offensive. The author's optimism doesn't cloud her ability to see the severity of today's ongoing far-right backlash, but she does reinterpret it as a violent trashing of a dying old world that will lead to the birth of a new one--a world with a greater understanding of the "interconnection" between people, animals, and nature. While it's a powerful idea, the author's continual reworking of the phrase "beginnings are what come after endings" and constant reassertion that change will emerge "so subtly, so slowly" can come off like she's trying to convince herself as much as readers. The result is a well-intentioned but faulty antidote against fatalism. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A declaration of hope. In her latest book, Solnit surveys the past 60 years of social, scientific, political, and cultural changes that inspire her to feel hopeful for the future. "The rise of Indigenous influence, the shift in scientific understanding, the return to a view of nature as essential and omnipresent," and the achievements of human rights movements all have transformed the world into which Solnit was born in 1961. Despite a world "rife with white supremacy, misogyny, authoritarianism, transphobia, savage hypercapitalism, tragic consumerism, ecocide, and climate denial," the author sees evidence of positive change in the ways we understand gender, sexuality, race, nature, equality, and, most importantly, interconnectedness. The past decades, she asserts, have seen a shift "toward the idea that everything is connected, that the world is a network of interrelated systems, that the isolated individual is at best a fiction." A climate and human rights activist, Solnit examines the insidious consequences of the ideology of isolation, to which she attributes current virulent efforts at suppression, fear of diversity, and denigration of ideas considered "woke." Instead, she offers persuasive evidence of the acknowledgment of the connection of humans to wilderness, nature, and one another: local groups cleaning up salmon streams and watching the fish return; an energy revolution focused on renewables; the impact of anti-racist, feminist, immigrant, disability-rights, and queer-rights movements; the emergence of environmental awareness in creating laws and systems to protect the natural world; the shift to decolonization globally. "We assume," she writes, "that the present is not in labor to bring forth a future unlike itself--and it is easier to see the old world dying than the new world being born. But beginnings are what come after endings." A convincing vision of a brighter future. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
