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Check for Availabilityout of stock. Click on the button below to search for this title in other formats.  A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Staff Pick
"Rebecca Solnit's marvelous new book of essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is about the spaces between stability and risk, solitude, and the occasional claustrophobia of ordinary life. She explores the mysterious without puncturing the mystery, and that is a remarkable achievement indeed." Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)"A Field Guide to Getting Lost could be considered a very erudite sort of self-help book, dispensing, as it does, lessons such as, 'fear of making mistakes can itself be a huge mistake.' But it would be a shame to squeeze this book into a genre; it is a book brilliant in its connections and brave in its digressions. It is a book (of course it is) to get lost in." Anna Godbersen, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:With such acclaimed books as River of Shadows and Wanderlust, activist and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit has emerged as one of the most original and penetrating writers at work today. Her brilliant new book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is about the stories we use to navigate our way through the world, and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves, or losing ourselves. Written as a series of autobiographical essays, it draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. While deeply personal, Solnit's book is not just a memoir, since her own stories link up with everything from the captivity narratives of early American immigrants to endangered species to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting, not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery that only a writer of Solnit's caliber and curiosity could produce, a book that will appeal not only to her growing legion of admirers but to the readers of Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, and Annie Dillard. Review:"The virtues of being open to new and transformative experiences are rhapsodized but not really illuminated in this discursive and somewhat gauzy set of linked essays. Cultural historian Solnit, an NBCC award winner for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, allows the subject of getting lost to lead her where it will, from early American captivity narratives to the avant-garde artist Yves Klein. She interlaces personal and familial histories of disorientation and reinvention, writing of her Russian Jewish forebears' arrival in the New World, her experiences driving around the American west and listening to country music, and her youthful immersion in the punk rock demimonde. Unfortunately, the conceit of embracing the unknown is not enough to impart thematic unity to these essays; one piece ties together the author's love affair with a reclusive man, desert fauna, Hitchcock's Vertigo and the blind seer Tiresias in ways that will indeed leave readers feeling lost. Solnit's writing is as abstract and intangible as her subject, veering between oceanic lyricism ('Blue is the color of longing for the distance you never arrive in') and penses about the limitations of human understanding ('Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map's information is what's left out, the unmapped and unmappable') that seem profound but are actually banal once you think about them. Agent, Bonnie Nadell at Frederick Hill Assoc. (July 11)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:"Solnit not only thinks innovatively and writes beautifully, she also trips the wire in the mind that hushes the static of routine concerns and allows readers to perceive hidden aspects of life." Booklist Review:"Solnit is a distinctive and original writer....[A]lthough one might hesitate to call her a consummate prose stylist, her expressive, often beautiful writing finely conveys the force of her insights and vision. For the intrepid Blakean 'mental traveler' as well as for travelers of the physical realms, A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a book to set you wandering down strangely fruitful trails of thought." Los Angeles Times Review:"At its best, Solnit's writing in Getting Lost evokes some of the great writers of the West, especially the desert and its denizens: Edward Abbey, Willa Cather and, perhaps most of all, Mary Austin, with whom Solnit shares a feminist sensibility about the place of humans in the natural world." San Diego Union-Tribune Synopsis:Written as a series of autobiographical essays, it draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. While deeply personal, Solnit's book is not just a memoir, since her own stories link up with everything from the captivity narratives of early American immigrants to endangered species to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting. What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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