Hope in the Dark

Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Paperback, 152 pages

English language

Published by Nation Books.

ISBN:
978-1-56025-577-2
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OCLC Number:
54778566

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"Author Rebecca Solnit draws on her life as a writer and activist, on the events of our moment, on our deepest past, to argue for hope - hope even in the dark. Solnit reminds us of how changed the world has been by the activism of the past five decades. Offering a dazzling account of some of the least expected of those changes, she proposes a vision of cause-and-effect relations that provides new grounds for political engagement in the present. Counting historic victories - from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Zapatista uprising to Seattle in 1999 to the Worldwide marches against war in Iraq to Cancun in September 2003 - she traces the rise of a sophisticated, supple, nonviolent new movement of movements that unites all the diverse and fragmentary issues of the eighties and nineties in our new century."--BOOK JACKET.

14 editions

Review of 'Hope in the Dark' on 'LibraryThing'

Meh.

Actually that's not quite fair. I wish I'd read this when it first came out, because it would have saved me several years in getting a sense of what the nebulous-sounding global social justice movements that spawned things like the Seattle WTO protests were about. But reading it in 2018 I found myself too often reacting with either "how did you not see that [e.g.] Chavez was a problem?", or "yes, that's nice in itself, but we're so manifestly losing this battle". There are some useful rays of light in it, and Solnit's a great writer, but on balance I think this book left me feeling more hopeless and depressed.

Subjects

  • Social action
  • Politics/International Relations
  • Environmental Policy
  • U.S. - Contemporary Politics
  • Political Science
  • Politics / Current Events
  • Social change
  • Public Policy - General
  • History & Theory - General
  • Government - General
  • Hope