The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit

Her books about her travels (to Iceland, to Ireland, her deep interest in how we view landscape and climate, her accounts of her walks and raft trips and reading, her intelligent writing on violence and politics - all of it is congenial to my own thinking. She’s a writer I return to again and again. One of them is Rebecca Solnit’s The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness and it’s entirely suited to this kind of magpie reading. Her essays are a beacon for readers looking for alternative ideas in these imperiled times.On my bedside table, there are a couple of books I haven’t read from cover to cover but they’re ones I dip into from time to time.

In its encyclopedic reach and its generous compassion, Solnit’s collection charts a way through the thickets of our complex social and political worlds. Solnit looks back to history and the progress of political movements to find an antidote to despair in what many feel as lost causes. Rarely can a reader find such penetrating critiques of our time and its failures leavened with such generous heapings of hope. The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness proves Rebecca Solnit worthy of the accolades and honors she’s received. It’s no wonder she’s been compared in Bookforum to Susan Sontag and Annie Dillard and in the San Francisco Chronicle to Joan Didion.

Solnit moves nimbly from Orwell to Elvis, to contemporary urban gardening to 1970s California macramé and punk rock, and on to searing questions about the environment, freedom, family, class, work, and friendship. This rich collection tours places as diverse as Haiti and Iceland movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring an original take on the question of who did Henry David Thoreau’s laundry and a searching look at what the hatred of country music really means. Gathered here are celebrated iconic essays along with little-known pieces that create a powerful survey of the world we live in, from the jungles of the Zapatistas in Mexico to the splendors of the Arctic. As the title suggests, the territory of Solnit’s concerns is vast, and in her signature alchemical style she combines commentary on history, justice, war and peace, and explorations of place, art, and community, all while writing with the lyricism of a poet to achieve incandescence and wisdom. The incomparable Rebecca Solnit, author of more than a dozen acclaimed, prizewinning books of nonfiction including Men Explain Things To Me, brings the same dazzling writing to the essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness hailed by the Los Angeles Times as 'globally wide-ranging and topically urgent and the Boston Globe as 'luminous and precise.'.

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit