Read this book as the precursor to her more recent 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost. but it stands above the rest as Solnit blends personal account, literary history, and political passion into a fascinating and compelling homage and plea for ambulatory culture and ethics. This book was unfairly lost in the crowd of micro-microhistories that flooded shelves a few years ago - of salt, of cod, etc. Read More : Read Now Wanderlust: A History of Walking Description This volume provides a history of walking, exploring the relationship between thinking and walking and between walking and culture. Personalities as diverse as Wordsworth, Austen, Baudelaire, Breton, Jack the Ripper, Moses, Frank O'Hara, and Solnit herself make appearances.

She veers from the English romantics to Parisian flaneurs, from religious pilgrimage to protest marches, with diversions such as the history of English parks and gardens, and the regulation of prostitution. Beginning with recent discussions among primatologists and anthropologists that the bipedal walking is not only typical of, but fundamental to what it means to be human, Solnit launches into a cultural and political history of walking. Viking Books, 24.95 (336pp) ISBN 978-9-0 Walking, as Thoreau said and Solnit elegantly demonstrates, inevitably leads. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.Solnit's book is a masterpiece in sustained mediatation on a single, seemingly inconsequential topic: walking. BUY THIS BOOK Wanderlust: A History of Walking Rebecca Solnit.

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. 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. There are various ways of pilgrimages travels. The goal is the final arrival point but also the walking, it is a practice of fatigue and labor: walking like penitence.

It is the main activity and it is also a quest/search of something. Description A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell's Rosesĭrawing 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. Pilgrimages are based on walking and people want to be cured by an illness.

Wanderlust a history of walking