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Hope in the dark : untold histories, wild possibilities / Rebecca Solnit ; with a new foreword and afterword.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Chicago, Illinois : Haymarket Books, [2016]Edition: Third editionDescription: xxvi, 152 pages ; 20 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781608465767
  • 1608465764
Subject(s):
Contents:
Foreword to the third edition: Grounds for hope -- Looking into the darkness -- When we lost -- What we won -- False hope and easy despair -- A history of shadows -- The millennium arrives: November 9, 1989 -- The millennium arrives: January 1, 1994 -- The millennium arrives: November 30, 1999 -- The millennium arrives: September 11, 2001 -- The millennium arrives: February 15, 2003 -- Changing the imagination of change -- On the indirectness of direct action -- The angel of alternate history -- Viagra for Caribou -- Getting the hell out of paradise -- Across the great divide -- After ideology, or, Alterations in time -- The global local, or, Alterations in place -- A dream three times the size of Texas -- Doubt -- 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.
Summary: With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 303.4 S688 Available 33111010861447
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"One of the Best Books of the 21st Century."
--The Guardian

"No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium."
--Bill McKibben

"An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways."
--The New Yorker

A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them--and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of 2016 in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book.

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; 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). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 145-152).

Foreword to the third edition: Grounds for hope -- Looking into the darkness -- When we lost -- What we won -- False hope and easy despair -- A history of shadows -- The millennium arrives: November 9, 1989 -- The millennium arrives: January 1, 1994 -- The millennium arrives: November 30, 1999 -- The millennium arrives: September 11, 2001 -- The millennium arrives: February 15, 2003 -- Changing the imagination of change -- On the indirectness of direct action -- The angel of alternate history -- Viagra for Caribou -- Getting the hell out of paradise -- Across the great divide -- After ideology, or, Alterations in time -- The global local, or, Alterations in place -- A dream three times the size of Texas -- Doubt -- 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.

With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.

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