Wanderlust: A History of Walking Author: Rebecca Solnit | Language: English | ISBN:
B004IATCYI | Format: EPUB
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Description
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.
- File Size: 698 KB
- Print Length: 338 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0140286012
- Publisher: Penguin Books (June 1, 2001)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004IATCYI
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #88,134 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Outdoors & Nature > Hiking & Camping > Walking - #44
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Consciousness & Thought - #48
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Anatomy
- #7
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Outdoors & Nature > Hiking & Camping > Walking - #44
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Consciousness & Thought - #48
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Biological Sciences > Anatomy
Solnit's "history of walking" is a surprising excursion in a vast and unsystematised subject area. Indeed, like eating and playing, walking is one of these emblematic human activities that are invested with wildly different cultural meanings. I picked up the book because I am an avid walker and mountaineer and, as I learned, an adherent to the British walking tour ethos. For me there is something fundamentally cleansing, wholesome and right about spending time in the great outdoors. However, this smug romanticism, this adhering to an "established religion for the middle class" is sternly criticised by the author of this book.
For Solnit walking is a quintessentially political activity. And the politics play out at different levels. First, walking is a bulwark against the erosion of the mind by the incessant contemporary rethoric of efficiency and functionality. The walker exposes herself to the accidental, the unexpected, the random and unscreened, and by doing so rebels against the speed and alienation endemic in our postindustrial world. Second, walking is also a reclamation of a physical and public space that is increasingly suburbanised and privatised. Solnit discusses how the early 20th century city was an arena for aesthetic experimentation and political agitation. Walkers and flaneurs, starting with De Quincey in London and Baudelaire in Paris, experimented with an urban underground culture suffused with eroticism and desire. Protest marchers all over the world and throughout the ages have relied on the democratic functions of the street to make their voices heard. Today, the scope for these kinds of trespasses are increasingly rare due to encroaching private property rights and a soulless, panoptic urban architecture.
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