NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain, we need to be ready for the work to come

NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain
REBECCA SOLNIT
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.

Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.

"I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take," Solnit writes in the introduction, "the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past."

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really don't know how better to say what this collection reveals to the reader than: "...the future is not as it is so often spoken of—as a place that already exists, toward which we are trudging—but as a place that we are creating with what we do and how we do it (or don't) in the present.
... Hope is that recognition and a commitment to the pursuit of the better possibilities within the spaciousness of the unknown, the not yet created." And there it is.

What Author Solnit does is always to present the case there is hope in a world presented to us by our media of informing and advising us as ever more hopeless, ever darker, a hellscape...and we bu it then despair of it being fixable. Despair immobilizes you. Sit quiet, no TV/internet noise, and observe the people around you. In the moments of life in the majority of the world where they are, people are carrying on being fathers and mothers and teachers and firemen and everything beyond...there is reason for hope in that, there are not roving gangs of armed bandits in the streets of New York or Peoria or Dallas.

Unhook yourself from believing news is The Truth, instead of the curated opinions that create profits by engaging you in a doom spiral that it, by design, is. Author Solnit will focus your attention on what work needs doing, to fix or repair the very real issues, problems, and do it without ignoring or sugarcoating the real, serious issues...climate change, official corruption...that exist.

It's the US midterm election today. No matter what happens in these elections, tomorrow's work will still need doing on every front from every last one of us, political agnostics/refuseniks or not. Feeding the hungry, cleaning the streets, the waterways, all of it still needs doing whoever happens to be in power.

Reading this book will remind you of what, and why, it's necessary to give your planet and your world the help and effort it needs, and you can give.