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smasson13's review against another edition
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Fantastic book. Though I am reading it well after the re release was done, so I fear that some of the hopeful comments and ideas that are offered may have changed in the current state of the world, both politically and environmentally. I would love to read an updated version for sure.
si_hui_olive's review against another edition
5.0
I recommend this book to everyone living in this century of rampant despair and distrust, to anyone losing faith that the individual can make any sort of difference.
Rebecca Solnit writes beautifully here as always. The book is powerful and motivating. She gives examples of how our actions have ripple effects and this message could not have come into my life at a better time.
Hope is not denying reality. It is acknowledging the uncertainty of the future and knowing that in the darkness there is room to act, to cause change. An embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.
It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact are things we can't know beforehand.
Hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks from the present, the surprises.
Great quotes:
Maria Popova: Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivete.
F Scott Fitzgerald: One should for example be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise
Virginia Woolf: The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be, I think.
Rebecca Solnit writes beautifully here as always. The book is powerful and motivating. She gives examples of how our actions have ripple effects and this message could not have come into my life at a better time.
Hope is not denying reality. It is acknowledging the uncertainty of the future and knowing that in the darkness there is room to act, to cause change. An embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.
It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact are things we can't know beforehand.
Hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks from the present, the surprises.
Great quotes:
Maria Popova: Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivete.
F Scott Fitzgerald: One should for example be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise
Virginia Woolf: The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be, I think.
moh's review against another edition
4.0
At some point in reading this short collection of essays, I went from having post-election nightmares about being unable to stop horrible things from happening to having dreams about taking long, circuitous paths to try to save someone or something. It's a pretty terrific book. :)
sgreenleaf's review against another edition
5.0
Necessary reading for anyone working for a better world.
e333mily's review against another edition
2.0
“Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky…Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.”
“To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.”
"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
—
Loved some lines in the introductory essay, but Solnit’s political observations continue to disappoint me with their lack of nuance. I also grew bored of the trite metaphors she would draw at the end of each piece (“the uprising was a green stone thrown in the water whose ripples are still spreading outward”, “the revolution was a flower whose weightless seeds were taken up by the wind”). She has her moments of brilliance, but they were sparse enough to make reading this book incredibly tedious for me.
“To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.”
"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
—
Loved some lines in the introductory essay, but Solnit’s political observations continue to disappoint me with their lack of nuance. I also grew bored of the trite metaphors she would draw at the end of each piece (“the uprising was a green stone thrown in the water whose ripples are still spreading outward”, “the revolution was a flower whose weightless seeds were taken up by the wind”). She has her moments of brilliance, but they were sparse enough to make reading this book incredibly tedious for me.
noel_rene_cisneros's review against another edition
Solnit hace una reivindicación de la esperanza como fuerza motora de cambios sociales y como una forma de resistencia, tanto hacia situaciones sociales como naturales —tanto sismos, como huracanes, así como atentados terroristas—. Una propuesta necesaria, sin embargo, en algunos puntos suena inocente, sobre todo en los puntos en los que habla de concertar, argumentos entendibles pero que en algunos puntos han llevado a sacrificar movimientos enteros.