A review by msmartha
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

5.0

Some of these essays knocked me down with their brilliance—Solnit's skill for seeing the intricate relationships between seemingly unrelated things marks her as a great thinker and writer. Her use of Ana Teresa Fernandez's disturbing depictions of women to preface to each chapter is a real gift to the imagination. The far-reaching tentacles of gender discrimination flow from colonialism to marriage equality. For me the strongest essay of the collection was the also the murkiest. In "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable," Solnit points out that without language to describe phenomena, those phenomena remain liminal and cannot be addressed. In the concluding essay, Solnit calls the distance between men who silence women by explaining things to them a slippery slope down to the men who silence women through rape and murder.

This is a powerful collection—engaging with it broadened my language for understanding the road we all walk towards gender, sexual and racial equality.