David solnit rebecca solnit biography

In a now-storied anecdote, Rebecca Solnit and her friend go to a party at an Aspen chalet. While there, they are cornered by the older, wealthy host, and, after Solnit mentions that she has written a book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, subjected to a grandiose lecture about a “very important” Muybridge book that has just been published. “That’s her book,” Solnit’s friend keeps trying to say. But, as Solnit recounts in the blockbuster essay “Men Who Explain Things,” from , the host presses on, “with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.”

The encounter was a gift: it magnified absurdities that often skitter away in the light of direct observation. When Guernica republished the essay in , the year of a gang sexual assault in Steubenville, Ohio, the connection between rape and condescending to women at parties shone less brightly than it does now. But there was a stink in the air, and Solnit put words to it. (The piece inspired a now-ubiquitous term, “mansplaining.”) Solnit’s essay collection, called “Men Explain Things to Me,” arrived in ; three years later, she tackled themes of power, misogyny, and gendered violence in another book, “The Mother of All Questions.” Since then, Solnit has been recognized as one of the country’s most incisive feminist writers. What perhaps goes less acknowledged is her omnivorousness. In the twenty-plus titles she has to her name, she’s examined disaster utopias; arctic expeditions; her mother’s Alzheimer’s; the allure of getting lost; San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York (in the atlas series “Infinite Cities”); and popular and literary imaginings of the American West. These are subjects, not coincidentally, that open themselves to Solnit’s broader interests: in place and nature, in margin

American writer and activist (born )

Rebecca Solnit (born ) is an American writer and activist. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is the author of seventeen books, including River of Shadows, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; A Paradise Built in Hell, from , which charts community responses to disaster; The Faraway Nearby, a wide-ranging memoir published in ; and Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of essays on feminism and women's writing first published in

Early life and education

Solnit was born in in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother. In , her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated", she has said of her childhood. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the General Educational Development tests.

Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17, she went to study in Paris. She returned to California to finish her college education at San Francisco State University. She then received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in and has been an independent writer since

Career

Activism

Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early s, as described in her book Savage Dreams, and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era. She has discussed her interest in climate change and the work of org and the Sierra Club, and in women's right

As a pro-democracy, anti-corporate capitalism and economic localization advocate I urge you to support independent bookshops when buying my or other books. You can check the website of the American Booksellers Association, , to order or find your local indy bookstore and support Main Street over Wall Street. Here is more information about how Amazon operates that every customer should know: 7 Examples of How Amazon Treats Their 90,+ Warehouse Employees Like Cattle Thanks, David David Solnit is an organizer, writer and puppeteer. As a direct action, global justice and anti-war organizer, he was a an organizer in the shutdowns of the WTO in Seattle in and in San Francisco the day after Iraq was invaded in He is an arts organizer, puppeteer and a co-founder of Art and Revolution, using culture, art, giant puppets and theater in mass mobilizations, for popular education and as an organizing tool. David is a direct action, strategy and cultural resistance trainer who currently works with Courage to Resist, supporting GI resistance. He also organizes with anti-corporate capitalist, climate justice, anti-war, human rights, and environmental justice groups against the Chevron Oil Corporation, who has both a toxic refinery and corporate headquarters near his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Solnit edited Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World. With Army veteran Aimee Allison he co-wrote Army of None: Strategies to Counter Military Recruitment, End War, and Build a Better World (). His newest book, co-written with his sister Rebecca Solnit is Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle (AK Press ).

Rebecca Solnit

A Paradise Built in Hell is about counter-narratives, about the Left around me, particularly as the war in Iraq broke out in It’s about the stories people began to tell after we failed to stop the war, ‘We didn’t achieve anything, we’ve never achieved anything, we’re powerless, we’re hopeless, we’re doomed, blah blah blah.’ That story was so false, because it missed two things that many activists don’t get. One of those things is that we have tremendous power; the second is that we have changed history again and again, but in complicated, slow-moving, subtle ways, and sometimes sudden dramatic ones, and that’s a story that you need to have a long distance vision over time to see. It’s a story of victories that doesn’t get told much by what I sometimes call the Eeyore chorus of the Left. While a lot of people join the Left to find a counter-narrative to the mainstream, coming out of the Left, I wanted and tried to forge a counter-narrative to the Left’s most common stories.

Today the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, clearing the way for far more rights for same-sex people nationwide, and it’s a huge victory that was unimaginable twenty years ago. The world that I was born into was on