“The straight line of conventional narrative,” she writes in the introduction to Storming the Gates of Paradise, “is too often an elevated freeway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. River of Shadows introduced me to Solnit’s distinctive style: using measured, graceful prose, and relying equally on intuition and analysis, she makes thrilling leaps and connections, following tangents and linking ideas. Muybridge’s studies of human and animal locomotion, Solnit proposed, broke time down into its smallest components and paved the way for the invention of cinema and television along with the railroad, the first invention capable of transporting humans faster than water or wind power, Muybridge’s work led to what she calls “the industrialization of time and space.” Solnit followed those radical shifts through to the wired world of today, and “the disembodiment and exhilaration of everyday life.” Instead, the book flowered into a history of the origins of the modern world. I picked up the book not knowing Solnit’s previous work and expected a dutiful, mildly interesting biography of the pioneering nineteenth-century photographer. When I read Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West upon its release in 2003, I felt like my mind was on fire. Solnit is a prolific writer who spreads the wealth. The essays collected in her new book, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (University of California Press), have appeared over the past decade in such prominent publications as The Nation, the San Francisco Chronicle, the London Review of Books, and the nature journal Orion, as well as on the left-wing blog TomDispatch (edited by Tom Engelhardt) and as introductions to art books published in limited editions and overseas.

Her ten nonfiction books have been alternately published by major houses and by small and university presses. Each of the labels that have been used to describe her-historian, journalist, cultural theorist, critic, activist-bumps up against the others.Ī look at her publication history further illustrates that capacious quality. Her irrepressible curiosity has led her to investigate and reflect on a diverse range of subjects: landscapes both rural and urban, politics, the environment, indigenous people, technology, gender, art, and photography. Just what kind of a writer is Rebecca Solnit? It’s not an easy question to answer, given the effortless way she crosses the borders of disciplines and genres.

River of shadows solnit