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Summary
Summary
What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--to create a portrait of the range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers.The first general history of walking, Solnit's book finds a profound relationship between walking and thinking, walking and culture, and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in an ever-more automobile-dependent and accelerated world. With delightful profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction--from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja--Wanderlust offers a provocative examination of the interplay between the body, the imaginati
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A luminous study of a little-considered but essential human capability. 'Walking is natural, or rather part of natural history,' writes essayist Solnit (A Book of Migrations, 1997, etc.), 'but choosing to walk in the landscape as a contemplative, spiritual, or aesthetic experience has a specific cultural ancestry.' Moving with ease from discussions of early hominid skeletal structure to the place of wandering on foot in the development of the Romantic poetic sensibility, Solnit embraces nature and culture alike in this vigorous look at all things peripatetic. Walking, she observes, is good for us humans, and not only for the exercise it affords; it also 'allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.' Her portraits of famous walkers of city streets and rural byways alike'Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Baudelaire among them'suggest that the best thinking is indeed done, as Saint Jerome observed, by walking around; the author's remarks on the history of pilgrimage show the importance of peregrination in contemplative spiritual traditions. And Solnit's own memoirs of wandering on foot across the hills of California and England and down the busy streets of Europe's great capitals'and, in a particularly inspired turn, along the Las Vegas Strip'offer inspiration and succor to anyone who rails against the soulless supremacy of automobiles in the modern age. Walking alone can mark a person as an oddball, she observes (especially if, like the French poet Grard de Nerval, the walker chooses a lobster on a leash as a strolling companion). And walking alone can mark a woman as a potential victim or a prostitute, with all the attendant perils. Even so, the careful reader, duly warned, will emerge from Solnit's pages moved to wander. Full of learned asides and juicy historical tidbits: a fine addition to the literature of rambling. (First serial rights to Outside)
Booklist Review
Aristotle walked while he thought, earning his school of philosophy the name "peripatetic." Social activists marched on Washington, walking in defiance of injustice and oppression. The religious faithful still make pilgrimages by walking to holy shrines, a ritual phenomenon crossing all denominational and dogmatic lines. Solnit presents an absolutely fascinating look at how the act of walking itself has influenced our history, our science, our literature, and the very way that we see ourselves as human beings. Drawing on a multitude of diverse disciplines, Solnit illustrates that walking has led to some of the best, and worst, incidents in all of history. She examines why, for instance, Britain has devoted a large portion of its infrastructure development to maintaining well-manicured walking paths throughout the country. She investigates the social cohesion existing among city dwellers who prowl through their urban landscapes, day and night, and she delves into suburban angst and ennui, linking it to the dearth of walkable public spaces. In this discussion of walking's role in literature, politics, education, philosophy, feminism, and religion, Solnit walks to great heights with a historical masterwork. --Michael Spinella
Library Journal Review
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" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. vii |
| I. The Pace of Thoughts | p. 1 |
| 1. Tracing a Headland: An Introduction | p. 3 |
| 2. The Mind at Three Miles an Hour | p. 14 |
| 3. Rising and Falling: The Theorists of Bipedalism | p. 30 |
| 4. The Uphill Road to Grace: Some Pilgrimages | p. 45 |
| 5. Labyrinths and Cadillacs: Walking into the Realm of the Symbolic | p. 64 |
| II. From the Garden to the Wild | p. 79 |
| 6. The Path Out of the Garden | p. 81 |
| 7. The Legs of William Wordsworth | p. 104 |
| 8. A Thousand Miles of Conventional Sentiment: The Literature of Walking | p. 118 |
| 9. Mount Obscurity and Mount Arrival | p. 133 |
| 10. Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars | p. 148 |
| III. Lives of the Streets | p. 169 |
| 11. The Solitary Stroller and the City | p. 171 |
| 12. Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt | p. 196 |
| 13. Citizens of the Streets: Parties, Processions, and Revolutions | p. 214 |
| 14. Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Space | p. 232 |
| IV. Past the End of the Road | p. 247 |
| 15. Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche | p. 249 |
| 16. The Shape of a Walk | p. 267 |
| 17. Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two Points | p. 277 |
| Notes | p. 293 |
| Index | p. 319 |
| Sources for Foot Quotations | p. 325 |