The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World Dying and Being Born

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Description

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

Reviews

Praise for Rebecca Solnit

"[Hope in the Dark offers] An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways."
The New Yorker

[Rebecca Solnit is] the voice of the resistance
The New York Times

[N]o writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than Rebecca Solnit.
Maria Popova

[Hope in the Dark is] One of the Best Books of the 21st Century.
The Guardian

Solnit's writing is prose poetry and truly beautiful, her thoughts always exploratory and full of curiosity and wonder, the antithesis of dogma.
The Guardian

Author Bio

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell's Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act.