Storming the Gates of Paradise

by Solnit, Rebecca

• ISBN13: 9780520251090
• ISBN10: 0520251091
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-06-04
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual.Storming the Gates of Paradise, an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.-Mexican border, from San Francisco to London, from open sky to the deepest mines, and from the antislavery struggles of two hundred years ago to today's street protests. The nearly forty essays collected here comprise a unique guidebook to the American landscape after the millennium--not just the deserts, skies, gardens, and wilderness areas that have long made up Solnit's subject matter, but the social landscape of democracy and repression, of borders, ruins, and protests. She ventures into territories as dark as prison and as sublime as a broad vista, revealing beauty in the harshest landscape and political struggle in the most apparently serene view. Her introduction sets the tone and the book's overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch. In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison. These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnit's pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar. Illustrated throughout,Storming the Gates of Paradiserepresents recent developments in Solnit's thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.

Table of Contents

List of Photographs	p. xi
Introduction: Prisons and Paradises	p. 1
Uneven Terrain: The West
The Red Lands	p. 15
The Postmodern Old West, or The Precession of Cowboys and Indians	p. 22
The Struggle of Dawning Intelligence: Creating, Revising, and Recognizing Native American Monuments	p. 40
The Garden of Merging Paths	p. 51
Borders and Crossers
A Route in the Shape of a Question	p. 69
Thirty-Nine Steps Across the Border and Back	p. 75
Nonconforming Uses: Teddy Cruz on Both Sides of the Border	p. 97
Trouble Below: Mining, Water, and Nuclear Waste
The Price of Gold, the Value of Water	p. 115
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch	p. 128
Poison Pictures	p. 135
Reaching for the Sky
Excavating the Sky	p. 143
Drawing the Constellations	p. 165
Hugging the Shadows	p. 168
Justice by Moonlight	p. 172
Landscapes of Resistance and Repression
Fragments of the Future: The FTAA in Miami	p. 179
Jailbirds I Have Loved	p. 188
Making It Home: Travels outside the Fear Economy	p. 195
Mirror in the Street	p. 199
Liberation Conspiracies	p. 203
Sontag and Tsunami	p. 216
Gardens and Wildernesses
Every Corner Is Alive: Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist	p. 225
The Botanical Circus, or Adventures in American Gardening	p. 254
A Murder of Ravens: On Globalized Species	p. 265
Women's Place
Tangled Banks and Clear-Cut Examples	p. 275
Seven Stepping Stones down the Primrose Path: A Talk at a Conference on Landscape and Gender	p. 282
Other Daughters, Other American Revolutions	p. 297
Infernal Museums
California Comedy, or Surfing with Dante	p. 307
The Wal-Mart Biennale	p. 318
The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans	p. 323
Locked Horns	p. 327
City at the End of the World
The Orbits of Earthly Bodies	p. 333
San Francisco: The Metamorphosis	p. 337
The Heart of the City	p. 345
The Ruins of Memory	p. 351
Gaping Questions	p. 371
Coda: The Pacific Seashell to Ear	p. 379
Acknowledgments	p. 385
Notes	p. 387
Permissions	p. 407
Index	p. 411
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