Hope in the Dark is an exploration of optimism in an era of seeming defeat and cultural pessimism. When the worldwide movement against war in Iraq failed to persuade the Bush administration against military action, many activists felt that their actions had been futile, their voices ignored. This book arises out of this moment, arguing millions marching against war did not constitute a failure, but a step toward success. Throwing out the crippling assumptions with which many activists proceed, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit proposes a new vision of how change happens. She counts historic victories that we have forgotten-from the fall of the Berlin war to the Zapatista uprising to Seattle in 1999 to Cancun in September 2003-tracing the rise of a sophisticated, supple, nonviolent new activism that unites all the diverse and fragmentary issues of the eighties and nineties. Hope in the Dark is an invitation to recognize the vast, inclusive, inchoate, nameless, wonderful movement that shut down the Seattle WTO, that marched by the tens of millions against war in Iraq, that has learned many lessons from the past and is making its own future, and ours, against empire, against violence, and against the multinationals.

Hope In The Dark~Rebecca Solnit

Politics & Social Sciences

Rebecca Solnit

Politics & Government

Penguin PB CA

art: Jess, Berman, DeFeo, Conner, Hedrick, Herms

Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era

Arts & Photography

City Lights Books

Jerry West: The Alchemy of Memory is the long-awaited, richly deserved retrospective of one of Santa Fe and New Mexico’s most prominent artists. West was born in 1933 before the war that brought New Mexico into the modern century. His father Harold E. (“Hal”) West, a WPA artist, anchored his son in the rugged world of ranch life and an abiding respect for American regionalism, with a deep affinity for family, the ease of friendships, and the loneliness of the Dust Bowl prairie. West’s paintings explore the complex psychology of his dreams and the vividness of memories mixed in with his experiences and perceptions being a child of a world scarred by wars and the atomic bomb. All of this produces rich, complex, often challenging paintings of metaphor and allegory that speak powerfully to the beauty, mystery, and magnificence of the human condition that West examines in his work.

Jerry West: The Alchemy of Memory

Solnit, Rebecca

West, Jerry R.

History & Criticism

Museum of New Mexico Press

Fascination with the life of freedom associated with cowboys and the American West is integral to the mythology of our time and culture. In his cinematic novel Ranch, Michael Light reveals as much about the myth as he does about the specific traditional California ranch that he photographs. "Depictions of the West as a vast garden of romantic innocence and male possibility abound, but the claustrophobic violence and domination required to turn the dream into reality are perhaps less familiar."--the publisher. Part of a new series of books with gravure illustrations, this monograph is exquisitely reproduced and a must for those interested in the myth and reality of the West.

Ranch

Michael Light

Photography & Video

Twin Palms Publishers

Wanderlust

Amy Trachtenberg's Groundwork is an intervention that makes the pivotal agricultural history of East San Jose, California more visible to residents and to visitors, and creates a chance for remembrance and reinterpretation that can help sustain a locally-grounded identity.

Groundwork

Amy Trachtenberg

Mary Burger

Architecture

ORO Editions

This publication acts as a mid-career survey of the work of Julie Heffernan. In Julie's lush canvases, we find echoes of our past and warnings about our future. Stylistic references from throughout the history of painting coexist in these works with allusions to our current cultural fascination with consumption and the role it plays in our environment's devastation. For the artist, her paintings serve both as creative expressions and calls to action, "cries in the wilderness and my attempt to do something." Despite the foreboding subject matter, a unique power of Julie's art lies in her ultimate hopefulness, her belief in our power to eventually turn things around. Because, as Julie reminds us, "what we can imagine we can manifest." Karen Kienzle, Director

Sky is Falling - Paintings by Julie Heffernan

palo alto art Center

In Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit takes on the conversations between men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don't. The ultimate problem, she shows in her comic, scathing essay, is female self-doubt and the silencing of women. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of 14 books about civil society, popular power, uprisings, art, environment, place, pleasure, politics, hope, and memory, most recently The Faraway Nearby, a book on empathy and storytelling. She is a Harper's Magazine contributing editor.

Men Explain Things to Me

Social Sciences

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Drawing together many histories—of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores—Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction—from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja—finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.

Philosophy

Book of Migrations, A

Travel

Europe

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Books by Rebecca Solnit