Hope In The Dark. Rebecca Solnit

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      Rebecca Solnit has written eighteen acclaimed works of non-fiction, including Wanderlust: A History of Walking and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. An activist, columnist and cultural historian, she has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lannan Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.

      ‘Like Simon Schama, Solnit is a cultural historian in the desert-mystic mode, trailing ideas like swarms of butterflies’

      —Harper’s

      ‘Fascinating, inspiring and beautifully written’

      —George Monbiot

      ‘Hope in the Dark is great. The powerful in this world seem to want to frighten us into following their orders unquestioningly and this book offers us the key to liberation – and that key is hope’ — Tony Benn

      ‘This is a book to be cherished, something to keep close at hand for those dark moments when you wonder whether the world really is a better place than it was fifty years ago’

      —Independent on Sunday

      ‘Her passionate defence of direct action is a refreshingly corrective, while, crucially, her celebration of people power is proactive rather than complacent’

      —Metro

      ‘A jewel of a book. Solnit reveals where we were, where we are, and the step-by-step advances that have been made in human rights, as we stubbornly stumble out of the darkness’

      —Studs Terkel

      ALSO BY REBECCA SOLNIT

       Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era

       Savage Dreams: A Journey into the LandscapeWars of the American West

       A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland

       Wanderlust: A History of Walking

       Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and theCrisis of American Urbanism

       As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art

       River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and theTechnological Wild West

       A Field Guide to Getting Lost

       Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

       A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communitiesthat Arise in Disaster

       Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

       The Faraway Nearby

       Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas

       Men Explain Things to Me

       The Encyclopaedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

      REBECCA SOLNIT

      This Canons edition published by Canongate Books in 2016

      First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       www.canongate.tv

      This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Rebecca Solnit 2016

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      First published in the United States of America in 2004

      by Nation Books, 250 W. 57th Street, 15th Floor

      New York, NY 10107

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for the book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78211 907 4

      eISBN 978 1 84767 683 2

      Contents

       Foreword to the Third Edition: Grounds for Hope

       1 Looking Into Darkness

       2 When We Lost

       3 What We Won

       4 False Hope and Easy Despair

       5 A History of Shadows

       6 The Millennium Arrives: November 9, 1989

       7 The Millennium Arrives: January 1, 1994

       8 The Millennium Arrives: November 30, 1999

       9 The Millennium Arrives: September 11, 2001

       10 The Millennium Arrives: February 15, 2003

       11 Changing the Imagination of Change

       12 On the Indirectness of Direct Action

       13 The Angel of Alternate History

       14 Viagra for Caribou

       15 Getting the Hell out of Paradise

       16 Across the Great Divide

       17 After Ideology, or Alterations in Time

       18 The Global Local, or Alterations in Place

       19 A Dream Three Times the Size of Texas

       20 Doubt

       21 Journey to the Center of the World

       Looking Backward: The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People (2009)

       Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart (2014)

       Backward and Forward: An Afterword

       Acknowledgments

       Notes

       About the Author