Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual.
Storming the Gates of Paradise, an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.–Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to today’s street protests. The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millennium—not just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnit’s subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests. She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view. Her introduction sets the tone and the book’s overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch. In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison.
These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnit’s pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar. Illustrated throughout,
Storming the Gates of Paradise represents recent developments in Solnit’s thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.
Cuprins
List of Photographs
Introduction:
Prisons and Paradises
1. Uneven Terrain:
The West
The Red Lands
The Postmodern Old West, or the Precession of Cowboys and Indians
The Struggle of Dawning Intelligence:
Creating, Revising, and Recognizing Native American Monuments
The Garden of Merging Paths
2. Borders and Crossers
A Route in the Shape of a Question
Thirty-Nine Steps Across the Border and Back
Nonconforming Uses:
Teddy Cruz on Both Sides of the Border
3. Trouble Below:
Mining, Water, and Nuclear Waste
The Price of Gold, the Value of Water
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
Poison Pictures
4. Reaching for the Sky
Excavating the Sky
Drawing the Constellations
Hugging the Shadows
Justice by Moonlight
5. Landscapes of Resistance and Repression
Fragments of the Future:
The FTAA in Miami
Jailbirds I Have Loves
Making It Home:
Travels outside the Fear Economy
Mirror in the Street
Liberation Conspiracies
Sontag and Tsunami
6. Gardens and Wildernesses
Every Corner Is Alive:
Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist
The Botanical Circus, or Adventures in American Gardening
A Murder of Ravens:
On Globalized Species
7. Women’s Place
Tangled Banks and Clear-Cut Examples
Seven Stepping Stones down the Primrose Path:
A Talk at a Conference on Landscape and Gender
Other Daughters, Other American Revolutions
8. Infernal Museums
California Comedy, or Surfing with Dante
The Wal-Mart Biennale
The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans
Locked Horns
9. City at the End of the World
The Orbits of Earthly Bodies
San Francisco:
The Metamorphosis
The Heart of the City
The Ruins of Memory
Gaping Questions
Coda:
The Pacific
Seashell to Ear
Acknowledgments
Notes
Permissions
Index
Despre autor
Rebecca Solnit is the best-selling author of ten books – among them Wanderlust, Savage Dreams, and Hollow City – and countless articles, for which she has received numerous awards and accolades. In 2003 she won the prestigious Lannan Literary Award. Also in 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for River of Shadows.
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