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A review by fragglerocker
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
4.0
I forgot how challenging I find Solnit's prose and this is why it took me so long to finish this book. I'd recommend it if you'd like an alternative perspective on how to think about being as a leftist or liberal. My favorite chapter/essay was the one detailing the incredible kindness and community of the survivors of September 11 on that fateful day. It's so important to be aware of the thousands of small positive changes that make the world a better, more equitable place, while also continuing to work for larger changes.
A few choice quotes:
"[H]istory is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension."
"The only story many leftists know how to tell is the story that is the underside of the dominant culture's story, more often than the stuff that never makes it into the news, and all news had a bias in favor of suddenness, violence, and disaster that overlooks groundwells, sea changes, and alternatives, the forms in which popular power most often manifests itself. Their gloomy premise is that the powers that be are not telling you the whole truth, but the truth they tell is also incomplete. They conceive of the truth as pure bad news, appoint themselves the delivers of it, and keep telling it over and over again. Eventually, they come to look for the downside in any emerging story, even in apparent victories--and in each other: something about this task seems to give some of them the souls of meter maids and dogcatchers."
And finally,
"Violence is the power of the state; imagination and nonviolence the power of civil society."
A few choice quotes:
"[H]istory is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension."
"The only story many leftists know how to tell is the story that is the underside of the dominant culture's story, more often than the stuff that never makes it into the news, and all news had a bias in favor of suddenness, violence, and disaster that overlooks groundwells, sea changes, and alternatives, the forms in which popular power most often manifests itself. Their gloomy premise is that the powers that be are not telling you the whole truth, but the truth they tell is also incomplete. They conceive of the truth as pure bad news, appoint themselves the delivers of it, and keep telling it over and over again. Eventually, they come to look for the downside in any emerging story, even in apparent victories--and in each other: something about this task seems to give some of them the souls of meter maids and dogcatchers."
And finally,
"Violence is the power of the state; imagination and nonviolence the power of civil society."