Reviews for 2011 Pathways And Passages Mini Wall Calendar

The average rating for 2011 Pathways And Passages Mini Wall Calendar based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-05 00:00:00 Shellina Rush I want to tell everyone who has just been introduced to Solnit's work to start with her books on environmental activism. Although dense, these essays are beautifully written and are so much more engaging than her more popular books on feminism. I admire how much Solnit knows about her city, San Francisco. I think her writing in this is an amazing example of what it means to pay attention and also reminded me of Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing". I feel as if her ideas in this book could very well fit Jenny Odell's idea of "doing nothing" and of paying attention to the history of where you are and where you will go. Much of my thinking was validated by Rebecca's writing which made this book extremely engaging to read; for example, her opinion on cars, on "heartless" cities, and on the immense privileges granted to us, depending on where we live, that we are hardly aware of. I'm also glad that Solnit managed to talk about race in this book, too. She doesn't do as well as a job in her books about feminism and sort of shies away from the subject (If I remember correctly, she only listed statistics without substantiating it). She goes into the subject of the history of names and how often Native American history is consistently on the verge of being erased: "There is a great incongruity in the names of men upon the land, for these rogues and bureaucrats are too recent and prosaic to convey the benediction of saints, heroes, gods. Instead of the certainties of mythology, they convey'to those who know the history of the names'turbulence, economics, ambition, and brutality. In Europe, white people are indigenous, and they are often named after places. Some Anglo-Americans were named Winchester after the English cathedral town, and so were some eastern U.S. towns, but the western towns'there are twenty-one Winchesters in the United States'are often named after the men who bore that place-name, including two towns honoring the inventor of the Winchester repeating rifle, "the gun that won the West." Winchester itself comes from a pre-Celtic word and a Latin suffix,-chester, meaning a walled town, and the word is at least twelve centuries old. When places are named after men and not the other way around, people become more real and permanent than land. As Robert Frost once observed, "The land was ours before we were the land's." This book got me thinking about so many things! It encouraged me to get into landscape photography, which she discusses in a few essays at the beginning of the book. She's introduced me to so many landscape photographers, books, and activists who have done so much for the environment. The biggest criticism I have with this book is the use of the term "disabled" in the essay "Seven Stepping Stones down the Primrose Path". I understand that being "conceptually disabled" due to people believing they always need mechanical assistance in order to get around is a thing, but I wish the author could've delved in to the politics of disability and landscape. She acknowledges in her other book, "Wanderlust", that "If walking is a primary cultural act and a crucial way of being in the world, those who have been unable to walk out as far as their feet would have not been denied merely exercise or recreation but a vast portion of her humanity." Surprisingly, this thought wasn't given much depth in this book, which is sad, because I think that disabled people have a different relationship to landscape and walking. Not everyone is able to walk, or run, or go sight-seeing as often as others can. I would've loved for this to be discussed more, especially since it's central to her idea: "When I wrote about walking, I learned that one version of home is everything you can walk to. Thus I, with my few hundred square feet of rented space, can also claim a thousand-acre park that ends at the Pacific with a beach full of seabirds; four or five movie theaters; hundreds of restaurants, bars, and cafés; a big public library; way too many tattoo parlors; a fine collection of monuments, views, promenades, and more." I loved this book, and although it is very dense and packed full of information, I think that Solnit did a great job at organizing her writing. Each essay compliments each other beautifully, and her writing is full of profound meaning. I enjoyed this book a lot and will be revisiting it often. It has really shown me the best of Rebecca Solnit's writing skills, even after I was absolutely convinced after reading her memoir, "The Faraway Nearby", she is equally the amount of genius on her nonfiction writing about the environment. "There are no grand solutions, only everyday practices of paying attention, of valuing difference and the openness that comes with some risk, of rethinking home, and refusing to be afraid." (I apologize for my typos or grammar errors, I wrote this on my iPhone)

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-26 00:00:00 Takeshi Shiraishi Solnit is a hero to me; she defines what activism can mean and accomplish. I read these essays, and I get the message: not all you do will change the world dramatically, but you have to at least care, at least FEEL some sort of passion for the planet we live on, and then do something about it! I have never been willing to be arrested for protesting, but I imagine I might be on a FBI list for emails against Bush's policies... and circulating a Swiss German poster of Bush... Her main focus is environmentalism, but she writes about the antislavery movement, immigrant rights, and protests against the evils of capitalism with the same focus and clarity. Besides that, she is a great, great writer. With Solnit, there are always coincidences in my own life that make me even more in awe of what she has to say. For example, one night I had a crazy dream of a tsunami, and the next morning, over breakfast, I read her essay, Sontag and Tsunami (2004). "We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration adn then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish." "A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. he places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break. Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we;re consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely. I had that same conversation in Zurich with expat American friends, native Swiss, a German, and a Spaniard. We had just walked by the poster with a picture of George W. Bush in Swiss German and they translated it as "Wanted for crimes against humanity; considered armed and dangerous." And I may not be proud of the things my country does, but I love it, for its people and its nooks and crannies I have spent so much time exploring. That is part of what makes up a country also, its geography and landscapes, not just its terrible politics and foreign policies. I have been in awe of all the constellations I have been seeing lately here in Denver, Orion and the Pleiades are amazingly bright right now; another little convergence with Solnit and her esay about constellation as metaphor: "The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak adn be perfectly understood." She writes about how many of us have never seen the Milky Way, "which showed up in San Francisco only during the velvety darkness of the blackout brought on by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake..or that in the great blackout of 1977, the Milky Way presided over Manhattan for the first time in perhaps a century."