WANDERLUST
A History of Walking
A passionate, thought provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Men Explain Things to Me.
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,
A passionate, thought provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Men Explain Things to Me.
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.
- Penguin Books
- Paperback
- June 2001
- 336 Pages
- 9780140286014
Buy the Book
$20.00
About Rebecca Solnit
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award).
A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s and a regular contributor to the Guardian.
Praise
“Solnit is an elegant essayist . . . [she] joyfully trespasses across disciplines and genres, tracing a path through philosophy, paleontology, politics, religion, and literary criticism.” –The New York Times
“A tour de force . . . Solnit, a writer of unflagging grace, has a remarkable ability to wrest meaning from the mundane.” –San Francisco Chronicle