No Straight Road Takes You There

New York Times Bestseller
In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.
Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.
"I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take," Solnit writes in the introduction, "the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past."

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell's Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act.

INTRODUCTION
Backroads and Lifeboats: In Praise of the Indirect, Unpredictable, Slow, Subtle, and Imperfect
VISIONS
A Truce with the Trees
Sky Full of Forests
Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends
Tortoise at the Mayfly Party
In Praise of the Meander
Insurrectionary Aunthood
REVISIONS
Despair Is a Luxury
On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway
Against Centrism and Its Biases
In the Shadow of Silicon Valley
Masculinity as Radical Selfishness
Abortion Is an Economic Issue
Toward a Democracy of Voices
The Storykiller and His Sentences
Feminism Has Just Begun
MORE VISIONS
In Solidarity with the Future
Changing the Climate Story
Climate of Abundance
The Great Transformation
Hope on Far Horizons
Seven Sentences