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.
