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Overview
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.
Synopsis
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.
Onion AV Club - Noel Murray
The spirit of 20th-century America can be largely defined by a citizen's ability--or, more aptly, desire--to get into an automobile and drive somewhere. Modern people aren't confined to their homes or their hometowns; when the mood strikes, there are oceans in which to splash around, distant cities to explore, and long-absent friends with dusty guest rooms or lumpy sofas. A similar fervor swept Europe as the 18th century turned to the 19th, and William Wordsworth first experienced (and then wrote about) the liberation of walking. Even a poor man with no coach or horse could hoof it across borders and into foreign cities, to see the world firsthand rather than relying on the accounts of the landed gentry. Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust recounts the revelations of Wordsworth, then traces backward to the influence of Rousseau on the philosophy of righteous walkers. She traces back even further, through religious pilgrimages, nomadic tribes, and the evolutionary leap that took place when homo sapiens first stood erect and decided to go out to eat. Wanderlust purports to be "a history of walking," but it's not history in the A-to-Z, straight-timeline sense. Instead, Solnit takes a walk through her own passion for the outdoors, and through the pleasures afforded by pushing the body along at three miles per hour, which Solnit considers the pace at which the human mind really works. These rarefied musings on meandering--and the meandering way Solnit presents them--can be taxing. Her historical notes are often too dry, and her personal ruminations occasionally lapse into the fruitlessly poetic. But the bulk of Wanderlust strikes a nice balance between cultural history and its deeper meanings, and some passages and chapters bask in the warm light of universal truth. Solnit writes amusingly about the tendency toward fatuousness of "walking travelogue" writers, and she scores points off the co-option of hiking and mountaineering by the wealthy at the turn of this past century. Her brightest moments, though, are saved for the book's latter half, as she moves first into the city (where walking opens up seemingly endless new doors of discovery, reclaiming space that typically belongs to criminals) and then the suburbs (where people walk in their own spare rooms, on machines that go nowhere). She closes the journey in Las Vegas on a walk down the strip, where you can see the entire world recreated on a few city blocks, with no need for gas money.
Editorials
LA Weekly
A rigorous polymath capable of stunning flashes of original thought.New City Chicago
Solnit's story is wry and seductive, threading in Virginia Woolf.New York Times
Solnit is an elegant essayist...as a guide, she knows the path well; she is tireless and sure-footed.Noel Murray
The spirit of 20th-century America can be largely defined by a citizen's ability--or, more aptly, desire--to get into an automobile and drive somewhere. Modern people aren't confined to their homes or their hometowns; when the mood strikes, there are oceans in which to splash around, distant cities to explore, and long-absent friends with dusty guest rooms or lumpy sofas. A similar fervor swept Europe as the 18th century turned to the 19th, and William Wordsworth first experienced (and then wrote about) the liberation of walking. Even a poor man with no coach or horse could hoof it across borders and into foreign cities, to see the world firsthand rather than relying on the accounts of the landed gentry. Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust recounts the revelations of Wordsworth, then traces backward to the influence of Rousseau on the philosophy of righteous walkers. She traces back even further, through religious pilgrimages, nomadic tribes, and the evolutionary leap that took place when homo sapiens first stood erect and decided to go out to eat. Wanderlust purports to be "a history of walking," but it's not history in the A-to-Z, straight-timeline sense. Instead, Solnit takes a walk through her own passion for the outdoors, and through the pleasures afforded by pushing the body along at three miles per hour, which Solnit considers the pace at which the human mind really works. These rarefied musings on meandering--and the meandering way Solnit presents them--can be taxing. Her historical notes are often too dry, and her personal ruminations occasionally lapse into the fruitlessly poetic. But the bulk of Wanderlust strikes a nice balance between cultural history and its deeper meanings, and some passages and chapters bask in the warm light of universal truth. Solnit writes amusingly about the tendency toward fatuousness of "walking travelogue" writers, and she scores points off the co-option of hiking and mountaineering by the wealthy at the turn of this past century. Her brightest moments, though, are saved for the book's latter half, as she moves first into the city (where walking opens up seemingly endless new doors of discovery, reclaiming space that typically belongs to criminals) and then the suburbs (where people walk in their own spare rooms, on machines that go nowhere). She closes the journey in Las Vegas on a walk down the strip, where you can see the entire world recreated on a few city blocks, with no need for gas money.— Onion AV Club
Seattle Times
Delightful...Solnit covers all kinds of ground in her inspiring book on walking.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. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|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" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\Edward Rothstein
This subtle and suggestive study, though, is something else. Wanderlust is, as Ms. Solnit admits, an "amateur history," but amateur in the best sense. The trail mix is always ready at hand, providing unexpected nuggets (Hobbes, we are told, had a walking stick with a built-in inkwell) and piquant sensations (the desert, Ms. Solnit writes, is "a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor, like the blues").—The New York Times
Harlan
Meandering through human bipedalism, urban policy, garden design, nature treks, pilgrimages, and the joys of urban roving, Solnit's beautifully written chronicle visits several continents but ends with an inspired promenade down a new pedestrian paradise: the Vegas strip.—Entertainment Weekly
Olson
From peripatetic philosophers and streetwalkers to mountain climbers and protest marchers, this engaging and imaginative book explores the aesthetic, social, and political histories of perambulation.—The Utne Reader