Summary and Analysis of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities PDF Download

Author: Worth Books
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504044789
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 45

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Book Description
So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Hope in the Dark tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Rebecca Solnit’s book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of Hope in the Dark includes: Historical context Chapter-by-chapter overviews Profiles of the main characters Detailed timeline of events Important quotes and analysis Fascinating trivia Glossary of terms Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work About Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit: Written in response to the 2004 US presidential election, and updated during the 2016 race, Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark is a call to action for people who find themselves despairing about the political climate of the world today. Hope in the Dark is a long essay that serves as a primer on social and environmental activism and uprisings from the mid-to-late 20th century to the present. Solnit uses this history of protesters, writers, and workers to argue that hope is the necessary catalyst for action. She insists that radicals and revolutionaries must hold onto hope in order to create a world more like the one they want to live in, even in the face of enormous obstacles, and especially in the face of uncertainty. The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608465799
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). 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 activists 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 argues 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 our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “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, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101199555
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell's Roses Drawing together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction--from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja--finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.

Author: Mary Blair-Loy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674021594
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The wrenching decision facing successful women who must choose between demanding careers and intensive family lives has been the subject of many articles and books, most of which propose strategies for resolving the dilemma. Competing Devotions focuses on broader social and cultural forces that create women's identities and shape their understanding of what makes life worth living. Mary Blair-Loy examines the career paths of women financial executives who have tried various approaches to balancing career and family. These mavericks, who face great resistance but are aided by new ideological and material resources that come with historical change, may eventually redefine both the nuclear family and the capitalist firm in ways that reduce work-family conflict.Table of Contents: Introduction 1 The Devotion to Work Schema 2 The Devotion to Family Schema 3 Reinventing Schemas: Creating Part-Time Careers 4 Reinventing Schemas: Family Life among Full-Time Executive Women 5 Turning Points 6 Implications Appendix: Methods and Data Notes References Acknowledgments Index Many professional women intuit that male colleagues whose spouse handle for them the details of everyday life are favored in the workplace. Blair-Loy confirms this intuition and shows us how it happens. She captures how the cultural schemas of "family devotion" and "work devotion" contribute to the reproduction of gender inequality, and how meeting the demands of a husband's job and other people's needs push professional women to progressively abandon their work to take care of others. Her analysis also gives us hope by comparing the fate of pre and post-baby boomers. This is both an important scholarly contribution and a book that will help readers think differently about their lives. It should be required reading for professional women who aspire to maintain multidimensional lives.--Mich'le Lamont, author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and ImmigrationThis is a fascinating book with an important message. Blair-Loy's findings are surprising. She challenges conventional viewpoints. She is on to something really new when she writes about not only the interplay between cultural norms and individual actions (and institutional structures) but on the cultural schemas that evoke deep emotional resonances. An outstanding book.--Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein, author of Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social OrderMary Blair-Loy's book transcends old debates about work and family by examining the women who have beaten the odds and risen to the top. Her detailed examination of careers and strategies perfectly complements her subtle analysis of the schemas and visions these women have for their lives. Blair-Loy has given us not only a splendid view into a little known world, but also a new way of understanding the dynamic interplay of work and family. Looking beyond the static conflict we have studied so much, she shows how creative women put traditional schemas of family and work into a mutual transformation to build for themselves a new and more livable world.--Andrew Abbott, author of Time Matters.

Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608467201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
A collection of feminist essays steeped in “Solnit’s unapologetically observant and truth-speaking voice on toxic, violent masculinity” (The Los Angeles Review). In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, “Solnit draw[s] anecdotes of female indignity or male aggression from history, social media, literature, popular culture, and the news . . . The main essay in the book is about the various ways that women are silenced, and Solnit focuses upon the power of storytelling—the way that who gets to speak, and about what, shapes how a society understands itself and what it expects from its members. The Mother of All Questions poses the thesis that telling women’s stories to the world will change the way that the world treats women, and it sets out to tell as many of those stories as possible” (The New Yorker). “There’s a new feminist revolution—open to people of all genders—brewing right now and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful, not to mention beguiling, voices.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times–bestselling author of Natural Causes “Short, incisive essays that pack a powerful punch.” —Publishers Weekly “A keen and timely commentary on gender and feminism. Solnit’s voice is calm, clear, and unapologetic; each essay balances a warm wit with confident, thoughtful analysis, resulting in a collection that is as enjoyable and accessible as it is incisive.” —Booklist

Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101622776
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy, from the author of Orwell's Roses Apricots. Her mother's disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit's raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—that helped her navigate her difficult passge. Solnit takes us into the lives of others—an arctic cannibal, the young Che Guevara among the leprosy afflicted, a blues musician, an Icelandic artist and her labyrinth—to understand warmth and coldness, kindness and imagination, decay and transformation, making art and making self. This captivating, exquisitely written exploration of the forces that connect us and the way we tell our stories is a tour de force of association, a marvelous Russian doll of a book that is a fitting companion to Solnit's much-loved A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608469476
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
“[A] call to arms that takes on a range of social and political problems in America—from racism and misogyny to climate change and Donald Trump” (Poets & Writers). National Book Award Longlist Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the Foreword INDIE Editor’s Choice Prize for Nonfiction Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestseller Men Explain Things to Me. Called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, she has emerged as an essential guide to our times, through incisive commentary on feminism, violence, ecology, hope, and everything in between. In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, “with so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later.” To get to the root of these American crises, she contends that “to acknowledge this state of war is to admit the need for peace,” countering the despair of our age with a dose of solidarity, creativity, and hope. “Solnit’s exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy.” —Elle “Solnit is careful with her words (she always is) but never so much that she mutes the infuriated spirit that drives these essays.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Solnit [is] a powerful cultural critic: as always, she opts for measured assessment and pragmatism over hype and hysteria.” —Publishers Weekly “Essential reading for anyone living in America today.” —The Brooklyn Rail

Author: Geoffrey Wilson
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 1444721119
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
It is 1852. The Indian empire of Rajthana has ruled Europe for more than a hundred years. With their vast armies, steam-and-sorcery technology and mastery of the mysterious power of sattva, the Rajthanans appear invincible. But a bloody rebellion has broken out in a remote corner of the empire, in a poor and backward region known as England. At first Jack Casey, retired soldier, wants nothing to do with the uprising, but then he learns his daughter, Elizabeth, is due to be hanged for helping the rebels. The Rajthanans offer to spare her, but only if Jack hunts down and captures his best friend and former army comrade, who is now a rebel leader. Jack is torn between saving his daughter and protecting his friend. And he struggles just to stay alive as the rebellion pushes England into all-out war.

Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher:
ISBN: 0593083334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.

Author: Tiya Miles
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.