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Reviews tagging 'Sexism'
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit by Rebecca Solnit
2 reviews
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
For some reason, I found it difficult to keep my attention to the book in the first half.
Sadly, some topics were obsolete… the author had given credit to many activism “wins” which have now been stripped away (2025).
The second half of the book was more hopeful and talked more broadly about how we have and how we can produce hope through out communities.
Everything is coming together while everything is falling apart.
Sadly, some topics were obsolete… the author had given credit to many activism “wins” which have now been stripped away (2025).
The second half of the book was more hopeful and talked more broadly about how we have and how we can produce hope through out communities.
Everything is coming together while everything is falling apart.
Minor: Addiction, Cancer, Chronic illness, Confinement, Death, Genocide, Panic attacks/disorders, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Slavery, Torture, Violence, Islamophobia, Grief, Murder, Cultural appropriation, Colonisation, War, Injury/Injury detail
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
This short essay collection is the best balm I know for activist burnout and despair.
I estimate I've read this book six times in six years. I'm thinking of making a tradition of listening to the audiobook at the start of the new year, for my mental health and to continue to develop my resilience against despair and inaction. I don't know of any other short yet comprehensive resource of the many victories of activism throughout history. None of this caliber, anyway.
In some ways it reminds me of James Burke's classic show Connections, but instead of showing the ripple effects of scientific discoveries and inventions throughout history, Solnit shows the ripple effects of a different kind of 'technology': collective social action throughout history. At one point she quotes Walter Brueggeman: "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair." Her aim is to help us remember.
In this quick 5-hr audiobook, she offers up an alternative to narratives that focus only on defeats and cruelties and injustices. She honors those, but aims to tell the more complicated and accurate stories that make room for the best and worst, atrocities and liberations, grief and joy. She holds up memories like a guiding light, and while the book isn't perfect, it never fails to show me a glimmer of my own power, and my own hope.
My favorite passage, that has helped me through some extremely dark moments:
I estimate I've read this book six times in six years. I'm thinking of making a tradition of listening to the audiobook at the start of the new year, for my mental health and to continue to develop my resilience against despair and inaction. I don't know of any other short yet comprehensive resource of the many victories of activism throughout history. None of this caliber, anyway.
In some ways it reminds me of James Burke's classic show Connections, but instead of showing the ripple effects of scientific discoveries and inventions throughout history, Solnit shows the ripple effects of a different kind of 'technology': collective social action throughout history. At one point she quotes Walter Brueggeman: "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair." Her aim is to help us remember.
In this quick 5-hr audiobook, she offers up an alternative to narratives that focus only on defeats and cruelties and injustices. She honors those, but aims to tell the more complicated and accurate stories that make room for the best and worst, atrocities and liberations, grief and joy. She holds up memories like a guiding light, and while the book isn't perfect, it never fails to show me a glimmer of my own power, and my own hope.
My favorite passage, that has helped me through some extremely dark moments:
"Sometimes the earth closes over this moment and it has no obvious consequences; sometimes empires crumble and ideologies fall away like shackles. But you don’t know beforehand.
"People in official institutions devoutly believe they hold the power that matters, though the power we grant them can often be taken back; the violence commanded by governments and militaries often fails, and nonviolent direct-action campaigns often succeed.
"The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.
"And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both.
"These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep. Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have many times before.
"You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future."
Update after reading this twice in 2024. (Not sure when I wrote my original review; sometime after 2016.) I decided to try making a practice of reading this book annually, maybe my first book each year. And in the wake of the 2024 election, I needed something to hold onto. Stories of past victories have helped a lot. The most quotable passages feel like holding a worry stone, going over and over the comforting perspective shift I needed in 2016, that I still need reminders of today.
And. It just hits differently now that I'm chin-deep in despair. Still helpful, thank God. But I'm feeling more critical of the book, and feel I ought to own up to something that's bothered me for a while. I'm disappointed by the fact she rarely goes in depth on racial issues. You could argue that perhaps she's trying to stay in her lane, but it just falls short of where any activist of any identity should be. For example, her essay on the hopeful moments of 9/11 feels so very out of date since it doesn't acknowledge the extremely racist outlash against Muslim Americans for many years afterwards, or all the ways activists have been fighting to keep hope alive in the face of that intolerance.
I'm debating knocking it down in my ratings a bit, like 4.5 or something, but at the same time its impact on me and the fact I do still want to keep reading it annually, make me think maybe I should leave it at 5 stars and just acknowledge its imperfections and capacity to do harm by falling short of what it could have been.
For what it's worth, I follow Solnit on FB and Bsky and think she'd probably do a lot better on racial justice topics these days. But it's also worth acknowledging that this book cannot be the end point of a person's work on the topic of hope in activism. I need to seek out more work from more kinds of writers on this theme.
Minor: Death, Sexism, Violence, Xenophobia, Islamophobia, War, Classism