Rebecca Solnit is enjoying a bit of a renaissance with her latest collection of essays: Men Explain Things to Me. The title essay explores how Solnit and women in general tend to assume that men are more knowledgeable on a subject than they are, even when the woman is the expert. This essay gave rise to the term "mansplaining," which basically means a man expounding on a topic on which he thinks he knows a great deal to a woman where the woman knows as much, if not more. The other essays deal with the intersections in the conversation between men and women, and those intersections are not pretty. Solnit has written several other books of essays, and I will focus on a few of them.
The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness is set up alphabetically by subject, and also geographically. These essays talk about global warming and its effects on Iceland, the phenomenon of the Google bus and gentrification in Solnit's native San Francisco, and the communities that grew up in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, among other things. Not as humorous as Men Explain Things to Me, but Solnit's wit is on display, and she has important things to say about what people do when the powers that be fail, a topic she develops fully in A Paradise Built in Hell.
Hope in the Dark takes a look at the leftist activism that is so dear to Solnit's heart. Her thesis is that dissent is not only alive and well, but actually accomplishing something. Whether talking about the WTO protests of 1999 or more local, less publicized actions, Solnit puts the lie to the common liberal activist mindset that resistance is futile.
Solnit won the National Book Critics Circle award for River of Shadows, which is a history of the past 150 years in California filtered through the life of Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer of the American west. Muybridge was instrumental in the development of motion picture film, giving rise to Hollywood, and his adventures also shed light on the development of Silicon Valley. Solnit weaves together the various strands of California history to show how it helped create the modern world.
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