Contemporary Activist and Feminist; she is the author of many well known books. According to her stupidity and nastiness is contagious during this era of social media. Gaslighting is a collective cultural phenomena now. Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone . She has been and independent writer since 1988 writing for Harpers Columns. With a varied literary career, as a writer, historian and activist she has written on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster.
Prolific writer on feminism, her books are:
1. Secret Exhibition : (1991) This is about Six California Artists of the Cold War Era
2.Savage Dreams:(1994) A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West - In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants that has yet to come to a real conclusion. A century later - 1951 - and about a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U. S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, in what was called a nuclear testing program but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. "Savage Dreams" is an exploration of these two landscapes. Together they serve as our national Eden and Armageddon and offer up a lot of the history of the west, not only in terms of Indian and environmental wars, but in terms of the relationship between culture - the generation of beliefs and views - and its implementation as politics.
3. A Book of Migrations: (1997) Some Passages in Ireland. In this acclaimed exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit travels through Ireland, the land of her long-forgotten maternal ancestors. A Book of Migrations portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Enriched by cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, A Book of Migrations carves a new route through Ireland’s history, literature and landscape.
4. Hollow City : (2001) :The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
5.Wanderlust : (2002): A History of Walking. What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers. With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction-from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja-Wanderlust offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker.
6. As Eve Said to the Serpent - On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001): To Rebecca Solnit, the word "landscape" implies not only literal places, but also the ground on which we invent our lives and confront our innermost troubles and desires. The organic world, to Solnit, gives rise to the social, political, and philosophical landscapes we inhabit. As Eve Said to the Serpent skillfully weaves the natural world with the realm of art―its history, techniques, and criticism―to offer a remarkable compendium of Solnit's research and ruminations.
The nineteen pieces in this book range from the intellectual formality of traditional art criticism to highly personal, lyrical meditations. All are distinguished by Solnit's vivid, original style that blends imaginative associations with penetrating insights. These thoughts produce quirky, intelligent, and wryly humorous content as Solnit ranges across disciplines to explore nuclear test sites, the meaning of national borders, deserts, clouds, and caves―as well as ideas of the feminine and the sublime as they relate to our physical and psychological terrains.
Sixty images throughout the book display the work of the contemporary artists under discussion, including landscape photographers, performance artists, sculptors, and installation artists. Alongside her text, Solnit's gallery of images provides a vivid excursion into new ways of perceiving landscape, bodies, and art. Animals and the human body appear together with space and terra firma as Solnit reconfigures the blurred lines that define nature.
7. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003):
8. Motion Studies time, space and Eadweard Muybridge (2003) :
9.Hope in the Dark (2004): Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
10. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) : Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place.
11. Storming the Gates of Paradise (2007) :Landscapes for Politics
12. The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (2008) :
13. A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
14. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010) : City Atlases, Book 1
15. Unfathomable City (2013): A New Orleans Atlas City Atlases, Book 2
16. The Faraway Nearby (2013) :
17. Men Explain Things To Me (2014) : This slim book-seven essays, punctuated by enigmatic, haunting paintings by Ana Teresa Fernandez--hums with power and wit. The book starts out with a funny, almost playful anecdote about being mansplained to by a pompous idiot at a party in Aspen, but then quickly moves into darker waters. Solnit goes on to use politics, art, history and new media as springboards for discussing the interconnectedness of cultural misogyny and how mansplaining and rape can be viewed as existing on a continuum. Towards the end of the book she summarizes this nicely: “It’s a slippery slope. That’s why we need to address the slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with them separately.” (p. 134) It’s a new way of looking at an ancient problem, articulated in a way that I don’t think I’ve heard before, and Solnit rounds out her case by anticipating counter arguments (i.e. men being falsely imprisoned for rape) and responding to them to the degree that they deserve.
Sometimes I wonder where it all began? This idea that the second sex is inferior. This idea that women have no credibility. This idea that women should not have the basic human rights. How were these ideas given birth?
Rebecca Solnit lays down some important statistics and talks about the different Feminist movements like 'yesallwomen'. She talks about Woolf's essays on liberation of women and spills the beans on IMF. At the centre of it all, she kept on stressing on how women were always made to seem they had no power in any situation and were at the mercy of men's wants and wishes and impluses.
Her wit and comic touch uplift these essays
18. The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness (2014) :
19. Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (2016) : City Atlases, Book 3 - She mapped names of places with women's names. She plans to make one for London.
20. The Mother of All Questions (2017) Further Feminisms. She asks if 'There is only one proper way for women to live - have children?' If women having children - cannot be taken professionally? Women are questioned about their private life, their body. XYZ composes happy life - It's not like that. Happiness is not something we are always. Talk with Jia Tolentino was amazing to listen to.
According to her Silence is what is imposed on us and what we seek to achieve. It is the ocean of the unsaid, the repressed, and the erased. It surrounds the scattered islands of those who are allowed to speak and what can be said. Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our voices, and of what a voice means: the right to self-determination, to participation, to consent or dissent, to live and participate, to interpret and narrate.
Who has been heard. The sea of unheard is vast, and the surface of the ocean is unmappable. We know who has been heard on the official subjects: who held office, attended university, commanded armies, served as judges and juries, wrote books, and ran empires. The same can be said for many North American figures, such as Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby, and Jian Ghomeshi. The voices of these prominent public men devoured the voices of others, until nothingness was left but their impunity.
21. Drowned River (2017) The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado
22. Call Them by Their True Names (2018): Language is very important.
23. Cinderella Liberator (2019) : In this modern twist on the classic story, Cinderella, who would rather just be Ella, meets her fairy godmother, goes to a ball, and makes friends with a prince. But that is where the familiar story ends. Instead of waiting to be rescued, Cinderella learns that she can save herself and those around her by being true to herself and standing up for what she believes. Cinderella Liberator is a stunning example of how talking lizards, cakes, misguided stepsisters, and even a prince Nevermind can reframe some of our most iconic traditional narratives, and is a beautifully refreshing wind of change in the arid desert of modern-minded children’s stories. In her debut children’s book, Rebecca Solnit reimagines a classic fairytale with a fresh, feminist Cinderella and new plot twists that will inspire young readers to change the world, featuring gorgeous silhouettes from Arthur Rackham on each page. She says, her inspiration is not two generation back, but two generation forward. Step mother - Buddhist hungry person.
24. Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters (2019) :
25 Recollections of My Nonexistence (2020) : In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas.
26 Orwell's Roses 2021 : “In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So be-gins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit’s portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.
27 Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World Essays 2022 : Only Introduction is by her. Barry Lopez is the author. An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture, Barry Lopez died after a long illness on Christmas Day 2020. The previous summer, a wildfire had consumed much of what was dear to him in his home place and the community around it—a tragic reminder of the climate change of which he’d long warned.
At once a cri de coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder, this remarkable collection of essays adds indelibly to Lopez’s legacy, and includes previously unpublished works, some written in the months before his death. They unspool memories both personal and political, among them tender, sometimes painful stories of his childhood in New York City and California, reports from expeditions to study animals and sea life, recollections of travels to Antarctica and other extraordinary places on earth, and meditations on finding oneself amid vast, dramatic landscapes. He reflects on those who taught him, including Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world. We witness poignant returns from his travels to the sanctuary of his Oregon backyard, adjacent to the McKenzie River. And in prose of searing candor, he reckons with the cycle of life, including his own, and—as he has done throughout his career—with the dangers the earth and its people are facing.
With an introduction by Rebecca Solnit that speaks to Lopez’s keen attention to the world, including its spiritual dimensions, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World opens our minds and souls to the importance of being wholly present for the beauty and complexity of life.
Gaslighting: manipulate (someone) using psychological methods into questioning their own sanity or powers of reasoning. Feminist gave the name sexual harassment in 1970's.
Women's right to express anger, is liberation. It is the right to expression for all. Though not pro anger, as it is not good for health, but it should be for both genders. Language is very important. It is unexpectable to use bad ones. Short term range is not good for any one.
Her essays are personal and related to public issues too.
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