The Faraway Nearby

The Faraway Nearby
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2013-06-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101622776

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.

The Faraway Nearby

The Faraway Nearby
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Granta Books
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2013-06-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1847087337

Gifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed three boxes of ripening apricots, which lay, mountainous, on her bedroom floor - a windfall, a riddle, an emergency to be dealt with. The fruit came from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance came stories spun like those of Scheherazade, who used her gifts as a storyteller to change her fate and her listener's heart. As she looks back on the year of apricots and emergencies, Solnit weaves her own story into fairytales and the lives of others - the Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. She tells of unexpected invitations and adventures, from a library of water in Iceland to the depths of the Grand Canyon. She tells of doctors and explorers, monsters and moths. She tells of warmth and coldness, of making art and re-making the self.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2006-06-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101118717

“An intriguing amalgam of personal memoir, philosophical speculation, natural lore, cultural history, and art criticism.” —Los Angeles Times From the award-winning author of Orwell's Roses, a stimulating exploration of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown Written as a series of autobiographical essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Rebecca Solnit's life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. Solnit is interested in the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. While deeply personal, her own stories link up to larger stories, from captivity narratives of early Americans to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery.

Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby

Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby
Author: Craig Varjabedian
Publisher:
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2009
Genre: Photography
ISBN:

Varjabedian illuminates the dramatic cliffs and plains of Ghost Ranch, once the home of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Wanderlust

Wanderlust
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2001-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1101199555

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.

Recollections of My Nonexistence

Recollections of My Nonexistence
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher:
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2020
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593083334

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.

A Paradise Built in Hell

A Paradise Built in Hell
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2010-08-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1101459018

The author of Men Explain Things to Me explores the moments of altruism and generosity that arise in the aftermath of disaster Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities? In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

The Therapist in Mourning

The Therapist in Mourning
Author: Kerry L Malawista
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0231534604

The unexpected loss of a client can be a lonely and isolating experience for therapists. While family and friends can ritually mourn the deceased, the nature of the therapeutic relationship prohibits therapists from engaging in such activities. Practitioners can only share memories of a client in circumscribed ways, while respecting the patient's confidentiality. Therefore, they may find it difficult to discuss the things that made the therapeutic relationship meaningful. Similarly, when a therapist loses someone in their private lives, they are expected to isolate themselves from grief, since allowing one's personal life to enter the working relationship can interfere with a client's self-discovery and healing. For therapists caught between their grief and the empathy they provide for their clients, this collection explores the complexity of bereavement within the practice setting. It also examines the professional and personal ramifications of death and loss for the practicing clinician. Featuring original essays from longstanding practitioners, the collection demonstrates the universal experience of bereavement while outlining a theoretical framework for the position of the bereft therapist. Essays cover the unexpected death of clients and patient suicide, personal loss in a therapist's life, the grief of clients who lose a therapist, disastrous loss within a community, and the grief resulting from professional losses and disruptions. The first of its kind, this volume gives voice to long-suppressed thoughts and emotions, enabling psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, and other mental health specialists to achieve the connection and healing they bring to their own work.

River of Shadows

River of Shadows
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2004-03-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0142004103

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology “A panoramic vision of cultural change” —The New York Times Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell's Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.