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A passionate, thought provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Men Explain Things to Me
Drawing together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction--from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja--finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.
- Sales Rank: #17230 in Books
- Brand: Penguin Books
- Published on: 2001-06-01
- Released on: 2001-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .80" w x 5.80" l, .71 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
The ability to walk on two legs over long distances distinguishes Homo sapiens from other primates, and indeed from every other species on earth. That ability has also yielded some of the best creative work of our species: the lyrical ballads of the English romantic poets, composed on long walks over hill and dale; the speculations of the peripatetic philosophers; the meditations of footloose Chinese and Japanese poets; the exhortations of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.
Rebecca Solnit, a thoughtful writer and spirited walker, takes her readers on a leisurely journey through the prehistory, history, and natural history of bipedal motion. Walking, she observes, affords its practitioners an immediate reward--the ability to observe the world at a relaxed gait, one that allows us to take in sights, sounds, and smells that we might otherwise pass by. It provides a vehicle for much-needed solitude and private thought. For the health-minded, walking affords a low-impact and usually pleasant way of shedding a few pounds and stretching a few muscles. It is an essential part of the human adventure--and one that has, until now, been too little documented.
Written in a time when landscapes and cities alike are designed to accommodate automobiles and not pedestrians, Solnit's extraordinary book is an enticement to lace up shoes and set out on an aimless, meditative stroll of one's own. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
Walking, as Thoreau said and Solnit elegantly demonstrates, inevitably leads to other subjects. This pleasing and enlightening history of pedestrianism unfolds like a walking conversation with a particularly well-informed companion with wide-ranging interests. Walking, says Solnit (Savage Dreams; A Book of Migrations), is the state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned; thus she begins with the long historical association between walking and philosophizing. She briefly looks at the fossil evidence of human evolution, pointing to the ability to move upright on two legs as the very characteristic that separated humans from the other beasts and has allowed us to dominate them. She looks at pilgrims, poets, streetwalkers and demonstrators, and ends up, surprisingly, in Las Vegas--or maybe not so surprisingly in that city of tourists, since "Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking." Inevitably, as these words suggest, Solnit's focus isn't pedestrianism's past but its prognosis--the way in which the culture of walking has evolved out of the disembodiment of everyday life resulting from "automobilization and suburbanization." Familiar as that message sounds, Solnit delivers it without the usual ecological and ideological pieties. Her book captures, in the ease and cadences of its prose, the rhythms of a good walk. The relationship between walking and thought and its expression in words is the underlying theme to which she repeatedly returns. "Language is like a road," she writes; "it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read." Agent: Bonnie Nadell. 4-city author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Solnit (A Book of Migrations) casts a wide net in an attempt to understand what walking contributes to the human experience. She argues that creativity has been linked to walking from human's first steps and that, now, our speeding culture discourages people from taking the time to walk. If this happens we risk losing a critical tie to ourselves as well as our communities and landscapes. Solnit's smart and entertaining points come to life through her study of the many literary references to walking (by such authors as Rousseau, Wordsworth, Woolf, Muir, and many others) and a social overview of the many ways people have incorporated walking into their lives (through pilgrimage, wilderness hikes, political marches, and city strolls, to name a few). Each of these modes of walking is a vibrant part of this compelling, sometimes meandering, social history. Throughout, Solnit clearly enjoys the different feelings and philosophical thoughts that walking evokes, often telling stories of her own walks along the way. Personable, but challenging and serious, this is recommended for all libraries. [See profile of Solnit on page 185.--Ed.]--Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal.
---Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
An erudite and idiosyncratic meander, commencing and ending in Nevada…
By John P. Jones III
…of all places. Nevada is a state one does not normally associate with a “good walk,” spoilt or otherwise. Rebecca Solnit covers a lot of territory, mental as well as geographical, in between her Nevada “bookends.” I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and give credit to Amazon, for suggesting it based on my “search history.”
Solnit lives in San Francisco, apparently not far from my daughter, near Golden Gate Park. Both enjoy walking in the most European of American cities. She commences by describing a familiar walk around a headland just north of Golden Gate Bridge, quipping on Heraclitus’s dictum on rivers: you never step onto the same trail twice. On the headland’s walk she relates her work in the ‘80’s, in Nevada, as an anti-nuclear activist, walking near test sites. Such statements as: “… a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat or plane,” helped “draw me in.”
As the subtitle indicates, it is the “history of walking,” and she does commence at the beginning, when our ancestors came down from the trees, stood upright, perhaps to see better, as they wandered out on the savannah, not to mention being able to carry a few things. She also found resonance in the first line from a book I read so very long ago, Robert Ardrey’s African genesis: A personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man: “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born.” She relates the various theories and academic in-fighting on this issue.
Solnit has also lived in rural New Mexico, and although not specifically religious, participated in the pilgrimage to Chimayo. As she says: “…walking cross-country let us be in that nonbeliever’s paradise, nature…” From Chimayo the author segues into other famous pilgrimage routes, such as Santiago de Compostela, where she observes: “When pilgrims begin to walk several things usually begin to happen to their perceptions of the world which continue over the course of the journey: they develop a changing sense of time, a heightening of the senses, and a new awareness of their bodies and the landscape…” I once would rent a holiday home in a small village in Provence, Velleron, and in the local bookstore picked up a copy of DE VELLERON A BETHLEEM which related the 10 month, 4650 kilometer walk of two very real religious pilgrims from that village, Claudia and Robert Mestelan, so they could be in Bethlehem, in the Holy Land, for Christmas, 2000. A remarkable achievement, for a couple in their ‘50’s, one that could not be duplicated today, due to the fighting in Syria.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth were both practitioners as well as theoreticians of the “art” and necessity of walking. They both claimed to do their best thinking while in motion. They were the godfathers of those who now walk for pleasure and not of necessity. Solnit covers numerous other authors, and has added to my list of “must read” books with the likes of John Muir’s A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, and the one she proclaims to be here favorite mountain memoir, Smoke Blanchard’s Walking Up and Down in the World : Memories of a Mountain Rambler.
Men and women are not equal when it comes to walking. The author devotes an entire chapter to that issue, starting with the horrific treatment of Caroline Wyburgh, age 19, who went out walking in Chatham, England, in 1870. Women must always carry a baggage of “considerations” that do not encumber a man when taking a stroll.
Ah, Paris. It is no surprise that the author has a chapter on walking in the City of Light, as well as exploring the concept of a “flaneur,” one who has the time to wander, and actually observe. Solnit has read much about and concerning the city, and concludes: “Such a density of literature had accumulated in Paris by the time of Nightwood (New Edition) that one pictures characters from centuries of literature crossing paths constantly, crowding each other, a Metro car full of heroines, a promenade populated by the protagonists of novels, a rioting mob of minor characters.” Soon thereafter, Solnit is in the antithesis of Paris, with its faux-this and faux-that, Las Vegas, and astutely notes how this city that represented the triumph of car-culture has become a place of strollers on “The Strip” due to the traffic jams.
The only error that I noted was on p. 134, where the poet Petrarch climbed Mt. Ventoux in 1335. The mountain is in France, and not Italy, as stated. Nonetheless, my personal standard for measuring the excellence of a book are the number of passages I have marked. A quick review indicates such marks on almost every other page. Solid thoughts, and witty aphorisms. A great book that will be referenced numerous times, and deserving of that special 6-star rating.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Brilliant in places, boring in long stretches.
By Shane Steinkamp
This is a very difficult book to review. In places Rebecca shows deep insight to what some might think is an unremarkable topic. In these places I am caught by Rebecca's talent as a storyteller and an author. I did learn something from the work, and I was able to appreciate a perspective that I hadn't considered before. These pieces of art strewn throughout the work are almost worth the price of admission.
But the book is really not a history of walking. It's more of a history of European and American literature that contains some notes about walking. At least half the book is talking about people who talk about walking. Rebecca also tries to relate walking to sexism, racism, and several other isms when such linkages are weak or non-existant. If she wants to talk about isms, she should do so, but not by trying to make them about something they aren't. Sometimes a walk has meaning, and sometimes a walk is just a walk.
My great disappointment with the work lies in Rebecca's almost willful ignorance in places, and the things she leaves out or ignores. For instance she gives one sentence to the freekorperkultur (nudism) movement in Germany and saddles it with the term 'erotic'. In this she shows that she has no understanding of the import or intention of the movement, even though it has a deep impact on her subject. She ignores many things that don't fall into her realm of experience but which are important to the topic. Barefoot walking; actually experiencing the earth with your feet. Rebecca skips over the very complex bio-mechanical process of walking.
Every author writes a book because they have something to say. Often this can be summarized in a few sentences, but it takes a whole book to explain it. I am at a loss to summarize what Rebecca is trying to say with this work. I find it difficult to recommend. I found the first half of some interest, but past Part II, it is so scattered and boring that it isn't worth the electrons. If your interest is in a modern history of walking in Western literature, then this is the right book. If you are looking for a book about walking, then seek elsewhere.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
lots of info
By sharon miller
I was given this book as a gift because I am a walker...Rebecca Solnit thinks a lot more about the endeavor than I do...this book is so chock full of interesting references that it is taking me forever to get thru it becuz I am enjoying looking up all her segues..in fact I had to pause and read 2 Jane Austen books and some Wordsworth in the midst of it. Very Thorough!
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