A short, elegant, passionate polemic on the history and future of progressive political engagement
- Robert Macfarlane,
A great book about political hope is <i>Hope in the Dark</i> by Rebecca Solnit. It's not long. Read it - and you'll see how the times of greatest hope are the times of greatest turbulence
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Time and again Solnit comes running towards you with a bunch of hopes she has found and picked in the undergrowth of the times we are living in. And you remember that hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow but a detonator of energy for action today
- John Berger,
An intensely personal account, a meditation on activism and hope
* Guardian *
[Solnit] writes with poetic succinctness . . . Her capable way of converting the activism of the past into a blueprint to inspire political engagement in the future is as relevant today as when first published
* Sunday Mail *
Fascinating, inspiring and beautifully written
- George Monbiot,
Like Simon Schama, Solnit is a cultural historian in the desert-mystic mode, trailing ideas like swarms of butterflies
* Harper's *
<i>Hope in the Dark</i> is great. The powerful in this world seem to want to frighten us into following their orders unquestioningly and this book offers us the key to liberation - and that key is hope
- Tony Benn,
This is a book to be cherished, something to keep close at hand for those dark moments when you wonder whether the world really is a better place than it was 50 years ago
* Independent on Sunday *
A jewel of a book. Solnit reveals where we were, where we are, and the step-by-step advances that have been made in human rights, as we stubbornly stumble out of the darkness
- Studs Terkel,
At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope.
This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq. Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. Tracing the footsteps of the last century's thinkers - including Woolf, Gandhi, Borges, Benjamin and Havel - Solnit conjures a timeless vision of cause and effect that will light our way through the dark, and lead us to profound and effective political engagement.