Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit’s books include Orwell’s Roses and the co-edited climate anthology Not Too Late.

Letter

Warmer, Warmer

22 March 2007

John Lanchester’s piece on climate change was powerfully disturbing (LRB, 22 March). But he’s wrong on two counts about the absence of ‘terrorist attacks’ on SUVs. First, there have been at least a few such attacks in the US: in April 2005, William Cottrell was sentenced to eight years in federal prison and ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution for destroying some 125 SUVs at dealerships...

For a long time​ before the planes crashed into the upper levels of the World Trade Center in 2001, songbirds had been in the habit of doing so, migrating by night and mistaking the lights high above the city for stars. At least one ornithologist used to stroll along the base of the towers in the early morning, removing small corpses and rescuing the living. A lot of species have been too...

Check out the parking lot: Hell in LA

Rebecca Solnit, 8 July 2004

“Birk’s book is better looked at than read. His pictures are a critique of urbanism, rather than a contribution to Dante studies or theology. LA has little to give to Dante, but Dante via Birk has much to give to LA. In Canto XXI, the winged devils of the fifth ditch fly towards Dante and Virgil as they overlook the freeway from a clifftop. There is a cyclone fence behind them, a one-way sign in the lower right, another shopping cart, this time full of the possessions of a homeless demon, and the flying demons carry beggars’ signs: ‘Will work for food’, ‘Homeless veteran’.”

Letter

Wanted Man

9 October 2003

Rebecca Solnit writes: I was quoting Nick Cave's version of the song from memory.

Diary: in the Sierra Nevada

Rebecca Solnit, 9 October 2003

“The few dozen houses had been burned to the ground and tanks used for aerial target practice were scattered between them. As we looked at the ruins of one ranch house, a noise erupted behind us so powerful it seemed more physical than sound. I turned just in time to see a supersonic jet disappear again, after buzzing us from 200 feet. . . The wars fought in the Middle East have been fought here first, in ways that one might imagine made them more real but instead make them more removed.”

The frontispiece to this biographical study is an unknown photographer’s portrait of the bearded Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) taken in about 1872. He sits awkwardly hunched on a crate...

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