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A review by lmsmango
Hope In The Dark by Rebecca Solnit
4.0
Rebecca Solnit does a very ambitious undertaking here, but her prose always delivers. I particularly enjoyed the chapters where she makes a solid case for grassroots movements - and how laying out the groundwork for a broader coalition, rather than treating social issues as isolated cases, should be the path we take moving forward. The essays themselves are more meditative than prescriptive, informed by her experiences as an activist and by people's stories on the ground. She deftly avoids the narrative of resilience and instead points towards how hope is an act of defiance, all the while criticizing the institutions that have made survival necessary in the first place. Was thinking of Freire the entire time. :)
On another note, it's pretty... insightful to scroll through reviews of this, particularly on the (negative) reviews that were hoping for some sort of concrete resolution. (Which is to miss the point entirely.) I understand the frustrations of having a lack of an answer here, especially as a person from the global south. But it's pretty baffling to expect Solnit as having the answers for those Big Questions when she spends the entire time talking about the struggles of others and encouraging her readers to take up responsibility - not to feel good, but to feel powerful - in a world that continuously strives to silence us.
So maybe I'll just leave this note from her own afterword: "And then there were my people, middle-class white people. It was as though many of us didn’t know how to be this other kind of person, this person who could speak of big dreams, of high ideals, of deep emotions, as though something more small-scale and sarcastic was the reduced version of self that remained to us. I've had great visionary companions the past dozen years from many places and races, but I've met so many of my kind who are attached for various reasons to their limits and their misery." :)
On another note, it's pretty... insightful to scroll through reviews of this, particularly on the (negative) reviews that were hoping for some sort of concrete resolution. (Which is to miss the point entirely.) I understand the frustrations of having a lack of an answer here, especially as a person from the global south. But it's pretty baffling to expect Solnit as having the answers for those Big Questions when she spends the entire time talking about the struggles of others and encouraging her readers to take up responsibility - not to feel good, but to feel powerful - in a world that continuously strives to silence us.
So maybe I'll just leave this note from her own afterword: "And then there were my people, middle-class white people. It was as though many of us didn’t know how to be this other kind of person, this person who could speak of big dreams, of high ideals, of deep emotions, as though something more small-scale and sarcastic was the reduced version of self that remained to us. I've had great visionary companions the past dozen years from many places and races, but I've met so many of my kind who are attached for various reasons to their limits and their misery." :)