Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

Author:

Rebecca Solnit

Description:

These provocative essays by National Book Critics Circle award-winner Solnit (Wanderlust, etc.), mostly published in magazines like the London Review of Books and Sierra and in books by other authors over the past seven years, attempts to understand politics through place. Her meditations often begin with landscape, but for her, "to be in the woods is not to be out of society or politics." She goes far beyond pristine nature, as she considers the mythology of the American West, ponders Silicon Valley - which she calls "a non-place" - and muses about antiglobalization protest sites in California and Miami. The impediments people use to keep strangers out of their gardens distress her, as do barriers that would seal the U.S. off from the rest of the world. She celebrates vibrant public spaces, laments malls and rails against the displacement of Asher Durand's painting Kindred Spirits from New York City to Arkansas, by a Wal-Mart heiress whose fortune is built on a philosophy antithetical to that of the painting. Activists and idealists Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs and Betty Friedan, and the visionary architect Teddy Cruz give her hope. Always insightful, these essays offer many shrewd observations about the social, political and cultural landscape of contemporary America.

For Solnit, walking the earth, placing words on a page, and standing up for her beliefs are symbiotic acts. Following in the footsteps of her guiding light, Henry David Thoreau, Solnit contemplates our sense of place, an ever-shifting mix of nature and culture. The author of 10 books, each a remarkably incisive blend of history and interpretation, Solnit, a global justice activist, now presents a potent collection of nearly 40 essays sophisticated in thought, elegant in expression, and catalyzing in impact. Solnit's anchoring place is Nevada, the site of the detonation of hundreds of nuclear bombs and countless battles over land, water, and the disposal of nuclear waste. Radiating out from this blasted epicenter, Solnit considers the fate of Native Americans, the fallout from the often overlooked Mexican-American War, and the enormous influence of computer technology. Reflections on such seminal creators as Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Eliot Porter yield surprising treasures. And underlying all is Solnit's quest for understanding how our dream of paradise has failed to keep us from ravaging the planet.

About the author: Rebecca Solnit is the author of twelve books. She is a journalist, essayist, environmentalist, historian, and art critic; she is a contributing editor to Harper's, a columnist for the environmental magazine Orion, and a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com and the Nation; she has also written for, among other publications, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Review of Books. Over the past two decades, her inventive and accessible style has found a readership across the wide public-to-academic spectrum. To give an indication of this appeal, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003) - her book on the history of photography, the dawn of the cinematic West, and more or less the annihilation of space and time - was awarded both the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism (on the public side of the spectrum) and a prize from the Society for the History of Technology (those tenure-wise academics).

Publisher: University of California Press

ISBN: 0520251091, 978-0520251090

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Nazareth Housing Association provides independent living houses for individuals and couples who are 65 and over and on the Sligo County Council housing list.  Nazareth Village is comprised of 48 houses in a garden setting.  The Village was financed as a public-private partnership between Nazareth Housing Association and Sligo County Council with funding from the Department of Environment, Community and Local Government.  

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