A Paradise Built in Hell showcases her distinct voice, allowing her to demonstrate her depth as a writer as well as the breadth of her research.

“Yet Rebecca Solnit sees human possibilities inherent in the certainty of big trouble.”īy the time A Paradise Built in Hell was published, Solnit had already established herself as a successful author and won critics’ approval for her books, including River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West and Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

“The bad news is that more disasters are coming, arising from any number of sources,” historian and Alta contributor William Deverell wrote in his review of Solnit’s book. Critics analyzed the book from the standpoint that disaster was a past occurrence or a hypothetical future, even though 2009 was a year with earthquakes, typhoons, and hurricanes of its own. When critics reviewed A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster, while inevitable, felt less immediate than it does now. Investigating human behavior, Solnit concludes that the kindness of citizens in the aftermath of tragedy suggests we’re more capable of broad, long-term social change than we might realize. We’re living through disasters as disruptive as the five Rebecca Solnit examines in her 2009 book, which Alta Journal’s California Book Club will discuss on September 23. Though she's grateful if you're buying her books here or anywhere.It feels eerie to read A Paradise Built in Hell in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, wildfires, and the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.

She encourages you to shop at Indiebound, your local independent bookstore,, Barnes & Noble online and kind of has some large problems with how Amazon operates these days. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and frequent contributor to the Guardian newspaper. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of seventeen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including the updated and reissued Hope in the Dark, three atlases, of San Francisco in 2010, New Orleans in 2013, and New York forthcoming in October 2014's Men Explain Things to Me 2013's The Faraway Nearby A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster A Field Guide to Getting Lost Wanderlust: A History of Walking and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award).

River of shadows solnit