In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.
No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world. “I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take,” Solnit writes in the introduction, “the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past.”
“A buoyant, historically astute appreciation of political persistence.” - Kirkus Reviews
“The urgent, prescient essays in Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There name social inequities and ecological pains while insisting upon hope.” - Foreword Reviews
“Solnit's writing is prose poetry and truly beautiful, her thoughts always exploratory and full of curiosity and wonder, the antithesis of dogma, so that it is impossible not to be carried along on her offbeat philosophical detours.” - The Guardian
“[An] inspired observer and passionate historian, [Solnit] is one of the most creative, penetrating, and eloquent cultural critics writing today.” - Donna Seaman, Booklist
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