Hope In The Dark
Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
Rebecca Solnit
“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”
Available as Paperback, eBook
This edition confirms Solnit’s seminal work as a timeless classic on politics and change
At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope.
This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq. Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. Tracing the footsteps of the last century’s thinkers - including Woolf, Gandhi, Borges, Benjamin and Havel - Solnit conjures a timeless vision of cause and effect that will light our way through the dark, and lead us to profound and effective political engagement.
“A short, elegant, passionate polemic on the history and future of progressive political engagement”
Robert Macfarlane
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“A great book about political hope is Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit. It’s not long. Read it – and you’ll see how the times of greatest hope are the times of greatest turbulence”
Alexandria Ocasio-cortez
“Time and again Solnit comes running towards you with a bunch of hopes she has found and picked in the undergrowth of the times we are living in. And you remember that hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow but a detonator of energy for action today”
John Berger
“An intensely personal account, a meditation on activism and hope”
guardian
“[Solnit] writes with poetic succinctness … Her capable way of converting the activism of the past into a blueprint to inspire political engagement in the future is as relevant today as when first published”
sunday Mail
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit has written eighteen acclaimed works of non-fiction, including Wanderlust: A History of Walking and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. An activist, columnist and cultural historian, she has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lannan Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.
