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Rebecca Solnit explores losing
yourself in the pleasures of experience
With such acclaimed books as River
of Shadows and Wanderlust, activist and cultural
historian Rebecca Solnit has emerged as one of the most original
and penetrating writers at work today. Her brilliant new book,
A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is about the stories
we use to navigate our way through the world and the places
we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves
or losing ourselves. Written as a series of autobiographical
essays, it draws on emblematic moments and relationships in
Solnit’s own life to explore issues of uncertainty,
trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. While deeply personal,
Solnit’s book is not just a memoir, since her own stories
link up with everything from the captivity narratives of early
American immigrants to endangered species to the use of the
color blue in Renaissance painting—not to mention encounters
with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and
the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating
voyage of discovery that only a writer of Solnit’s caliber
and curiosity could produce, a book that will appeal not only
to her growing legion of admirers but also to the readers
of Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, and Annie Dillard.
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.
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