From the author of Men Explain Things to Me - "A landmark book
that gives impassioned challenge to the social meaning of
disasters" (The New York Times Book Review)
"The freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature
I've come across in years."
-Bill McKibben
Chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington
Post, and Chicago Tribune
Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows- Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust- A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent- On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award.
Praise for A Paradise Built in Hell:
“Everyone feels alone in a crisis . . . It needn’t be that way. In
fact, as the incomparable Rebecca Solnit has shown throughout her
long, meandering, brilliant career, but especially in [this book],
it must not be. A Paradise Built in Hell is an eye-opening account
of how much hope and solidarity emerges in the face of sudden
disaster . . . [These lessons] offer deep comfort now, as antidotes
not just to feelings of helplessness but loneliness.”
—David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine
“[An] expansive argument about human resilience . . . Though Solnit
mobilizes decades of sociological research to support her argument,
the chapters themselves move effortlessly through subtle
philosophical readings and vivid narrations.”
—The New Yorker
“What will it be like to live not on the relatively stable planet
that civilization has known throughout the ten thousand years of
the Holocene, but on the amped-up and careening planet we’re
quickly creating? With her remarkable and singular book, A Paradise
Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit has thought harder about the answer
to that question than anyone else. Her answer is strangely and
powerfully hopeful. As she proves with inspired
historiography, disasters often produce remarkable temporary
communities—paradises of a sort amid the rubble, where people,
acting on their own and without direction from the authorities,
manage to provide for each other.”
—Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books
“Thought-provoking . . . captivating and compelling . . . there's a
hopeful, optimistic, even contagious quality to this superb
book.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Far-reaching and large-spirited.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Stirring . . . fascinating . . . presents a withering critique of
modern capitalist society by examining five catastrophes . . . Her
account of these events are so stirring that her book is worth
reading for its storytelling alone. . . . [An] exciting and
important contribution to our understanding of ourselves.”
—The Washington Post
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