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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
"Silence and shame are contagious; so are courage and speech. Even now, when women begin to speak of their experience, others step forward to bolster the earlier speaker and to share their own experience. A brick is knocked loose, another one; a dam breaks, the waters rush forth."
Powerful essay collection by Rebecca Solnit. Felt very in line/on par with her other collection, [b:Men Explain Things to Me|18528190|Men Explain Things to Me|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1393447237l/18528190._SX50_.jpg|26233826].
I think the key to fully appreciating this kind of book is preparing your expectations. As a cobbled together unit, they can be somewhat repetitive and disjointed.
There are also some real gems, inspired prose, and compelling truths—I remain a big fan of Solnit.
"These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender."
—80 Books No Woman Should Read, Rebecca Solnit (One of my favorite essays of the bunch.)
"Works of art that can accompany you through the decades are mirrors in which you can see yourself, wells in which you can keep dipping. They remind you that what you bring to the work of art is as important as what it brings to you. They can become registers of how you’ve changed."
—Giantess, Rebecca Solnit
For an excellent review on this book with amazing highlights, check out Brain Pickings' "Rebecca Solnit on Breaking Silence as Our Mightiest Weapon Against Oppression."
Defining silence as “what is imposed” and quietude as “what is sought,” Solnit contrasts the two:
Powerful essay collection by Rebecca Solnit. Felt very in line/on par with her other collection, [b:Men Explain Things to Me|18528190|Men Explain Things to Me|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1393447237l/18528190._SX50_.jpg|26233826].
I think the key to fully appreciating this kind of book is preparing your expectations. As a cobbled together unit, they can be somewhat repetitive and disjointed.
There are also some real gems, inspired prose, and compelling truths—I remain a big fan of Solnit.
"These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender."
—80 Books No Woman Should Read, Rebecca Solnit (One of my favorite essays of the bunch.)
"Works of art that can accompany you through the decades are mirrors in which you can see yourself, wells in which you can keep dipping. They remind you that what you bring to the work of art is as important as what it brings to you. They can become registers of how you’ve changed."
—Giantess, Rebecca Solnit
For an excellent review on this book with amazing highlights, check out Brain Pickings' "Rebecca Solnit on Breaking Silence as Our Mightiest Weapon Against Oppression."
Defining silence as “what is imposed” and quietude as “what is sought,” Solnit contrasts the two:
Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the erased, the unheard. It surrounds the scattered islands made up of those allowed to speak and of what can be said and who listens. Silence occurs in many ways for many reasons; each of us has his or her own sea of unspoken words.
[…]
The tranquility of a quiet place, of quieting one’s own mind, of a retreat from words and bustle, is acoustically the same as the silence of intimidation or repression but psychically and politically something entirely different. What is unsaid because serenity and introspection are sought is as different from what is not said because the threats are high or the barriers are great as swimming is from drowning. Quiet is to noise as silence is to communication. The quiet of the listener makes room for the speech of others, like the quiet of the reader taking in words on the page, like the white of the paper taking ink.
[…]
We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.
"Every day each of us invents the world and the self who meets that world, opens up or closes down space for others within that. Silence is forever being broken, and then like waves lapping over the footprints, the sandcastles and washed-up shells and seaweed, silence rises again."
—Rebecca Solnit on Silence, Pornography, and Feminist Literature
Like all Solnit I've read--i.e. brutal but amazingly well-done.
Insightful addition to the ongoing conversation and to feminist literature as a whole. Solnit is necessary reading for anyone.
Excellent! I have been meaning to read her Wanderlust and one or 2 others but I will definitely read more of her more overtly feminist writings.
DPL Libby.
DPL Libby.
Lots of thoughts & ideas that resonate... particularly interested in the authors all men should read conversation as how it relates to empathy / representation.
This is a set of brilliant essays collected from one of the leading feminist writers currently working. This book follow closely on the heel of her other well-known collection «Men explain things to me».
After reading her autobiographical essays on her «recollections of her non-existence» earlier this year, I’m utterly convinced she could write about anything. Socks. And make it gloriously fun and interesting.
It is written in a manner that is not demeaning or speaking down. With respect and humor simultaneously.
Due to Solnit’s gift of rendering a balanced treatise about gendered harassment, suppression, silence and losing our own voice, Im in awe of her. She writes succinctly about issues I and most of us have encountered ourselves and witnessed happen since the dawn of man.
And had the voice to collectively adress it. Until now. Im looking forward to further delving into her bibliography. Five more books are waiting on my shelves.
She has become one of my top tier authors. I highly recommend her to your immediate (haha) TBR.
- Non-fiction. Essay collection.
After reading her autobiographical essays on her «recollections of her non-existence» earlier this year, I’m utterly convinced she could write about anything. Socks. And make it gloriously fun and interesting.
It is written in a manner that is not demeaning or speaking down. With respect and humor simultaneously.
Due to Solnit’s gift of rendering a balanced treatise about gendered harassment, suppression, silence and losing our own voice, Im in awe of her. She writes succinctly about issues I and most of us have encountered ourselves and witnessed happen since the dawn of man.
And had the voice to collectively adress it. Until now. Im looking forward to further delving into her bibliography. Five more books are waiting on my shelves.
She has become one of my top tier authors. I highly recommend her to your immediate (haha) TBR.
- Non-fiction. Essay collection.
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
informative
inspiring
Brilliant opening essay 'A Short History on Silence' on silence and the silencing of women, the effect of patriarchal power, the culpability of institutions, universities, the court system, the police, even families, and their role in continuing to ensure women's silence over the continual transgressions of men.
Rebecca Solnit has been writing about this issue for many years, trying to create a public conversation on a subject that many continued to insist was a personal problem - yet another form of silencing.
As she wrote in Wanderlust (2000)
She makes a distinction between silence being that which is imposed and quiet being that which is sought.
The list of who has been silenced goes right back to the dawn of literature, it goes back millennia, classics scholar Mary Beard noted that silencing women begins almost as soon as Western literature does, in the Odyssey, with Telemachus telling his mother to shut up.
It continues through the years with the woman's exclusion from education, from the right to vote, to making or being acknowledged for making scientific discoveries to campus rape and the introduction of sexual harassment guidelines as law and the unleashing of stories and the wave of voices coming out of silence that sharing on social media has spawned, generating a fiercely lively and unprecedented conversation.
80 Books No Woman Should Read is her response to a list published by Esquire magazine of a list they created of 80 books every man should read, a list of books, seventy nine of which were written by men, and one by Flannery O'Connor. It becomes an essay on the reader's tendency to identify with the protagonist, except that with the books she mentions from this list that she has read, she is often identifying with the woman, noticing that some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.
And In Men Explain Lolita to Me she expounds further on empathy:
I haven't read Men Explain Things to Me, although I heard Rebecca Solnit speak about one of the anecdotes when I went to listen to her at the Royal Festival Hall in London. That was for the launch of her excellent [b:The Faraway Nearby|16158561|The Faraway Nearby|Rebecca Solnit|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1356092274s/16158561.jpg|21998977] a book of essays I loved.
The Mother of All Questions is a culmination of Solnit's and many if not all women's frustrations in the world today, where being a woman living in a patriarchal culture, no matter which part of the world, brings challenges that must reach a breaking point. It is a conversation that is happening everywhere and that hopefully might bring change for the better, as many voices come together in solidarity. It is an acknowledgement both of how far we have come and what we have still to be and do to change the culture of silence we have inhabited for too long.
Rebecca Solnit has been writing about this issue for many years, trying to create a public conversation on a subject that many continued to insist was a personal problem - yet another form of silencing.
As she wrote in Wanderlust (2000)
"It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness out of doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem."
She makes a distinction between silence being that which is imposed and quiet being that which is sought.
What is left unsaid because serenity and introspection are sought is as different from what is not said because the threats are high or the barriers are great as swilling is from drowning. Quiet is to noise as silence is to communication. The quiet of the listener makes room for the speech of others, like the quiet of the reader taking in the words on the page...Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanised or excluded from one's humanity. And the history of silence is central to women's history'
The list of who has been silenced goes right back to the dawn of literature, it goes back millennia, classics scholar Mary Beard noted that silencing women begins almost as soon as Western literature does, in the Odyssey, with Telemachus telling his mother to shut up.
It continues through the years with the woman's exclusion from education, from the right to vote, to making or being acknowledged for making scientific discoveries to campus rape and the introduction of sexual harassment guidelines as law and the unleashing of stories and the wave of voices coming out of silence that sharing on social media has spawned, generating a fiercely lively and unprecedented conversation.
80 Books No Woman Should Read is her response to a list published by Esquire magazine of a list they created of 80 books every man should read, a list of books, seventy nine of which were written by men, and one by Flannery O'Connor. It becomes an essay on the reader's tendency to identify with the protagonist, except that with the books she mentions from this list that she has read, she is often identifying with the woman, noticing that some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.
And In Men Explain Lolita to Me she expounds further on empathy:
This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and comic books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters in the Boring Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.
I haven't read Men Explain Things to Me, although I heard Rebecca Solnit speak about one of the anecdotes when I went to listen to her at the Royal Festival Hall in London. That was for the launch of her excellent [b:The Faraway Nearby|16158561|The Faraway Nearby|Rebecca Solnit|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1356092274s/16158561.jpg|21998977] a book of essays I loved.
The Mother of All Questions is a culmination of Solnit's and many if not all women's frustrations in the world today, where being a woman living in a patriarchal culture, no matter which part of the world, brings challenges that must reach a breaking point. It is a conversation that is happening everywhere and that hopefully might bring change for the better, as many voices come together in solidarity. It is an acknowledgement both of how far we have come and what we have still to be and do to change the culture of silence we have inhabited for too long.