Synopses & Reviews
Following the success of the acclaimed Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and The Great Railway Bazaar, The Last Train to Zona Verde is an ode to the last African journey of the world's most celebrated travel writer.“Happy again, back in the kingdom of light,” writes Paul Theroux as he sets out on a new journey through the continent he knows and loves best. Theroux first came to Africa as a twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, and the pull of the vast land never left him. Now he returns, after fifty years on the road, to explore the little-traveled territory of western Africa and to take stock both of the place and of himself.
His odyssey takes him northward from Cape Town, through South Africa and Namibia, then on into Angola, wishing to head farther still until he reaches the end of the line. Journeying alone through the greenest continent, Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of postcolonial independence movements. Leaving the Cape Town townships, traversing the Namibian bush, passing the browsing cattle of the great sunbaked heartland of the savanna, Theroux crosses “the Red Line” into a different Africa: “the improvised, slapped-together Africa of tumbled fences and cooking fires, of mud and thatch,” of heat and poverty, and of roadblocks, mobs, and anarchy. After 2,500 arduous miles, he comes to the end of his journey in more ways than one, a decision he chronicles with typically unsparing honesty in a chapter called “What Am I Doing Here?”
Vivid, witty, and beautifully evocative, The Last Train to Zona Verde is a fitting final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers.
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
Review
"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)
Synopsis
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.
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.
Synopsis
Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past two hundred years (Wanderlust), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America (River of Shadows), Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.
Synopsis
This personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy from award winner Rebecca Solnit is a fitting companion to her beloved A Field Guide for Getting Lost In this exquisitely written new book by the author of A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit explores the ways we make our lives out of stories, and how we are connected by empathy, by narrative, by imagination. In the course of unpacking some of her own stories—of her mother and her decline from memory loss, of a trip to Iceland, of an illness—Solnit revisits fairytales and entertains other stories: about arctic explorers, Che Guevara among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, about warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decay and transformation, making art and making self. Woven together, these stories create a map which charts the boundaries and territories of storytelling, reframing who each of us is and how we might tell our story.
Synopsis
The worlds most acclaimed travel writer journeys through western Africa from Cape Town to the Congo.
About the Author
Rebecca Solnit is the author of fourteen books, including A Paradise Built in Hell, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, River of Shadows, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.
Table of Contents
Contents
1. Among the Unreal People 1
2. The Train from Khayelitsha 14
3. Cape Town: The Spirit of the Cape 40
4. The Night Bus to Windhoek 59
5. Night Train from Swakopmund 79
6. The Bush Track to Tsumkwe 102
7. Ceremony at the Crossroads 118
8. Among the Real People 134
9. Riding an Elephant: The Ultimate Safari 160
10. The Hungry Herds at Etosha 180
11. The Frontier of Bad Karma 200
12. Three Pieces of Chicken 222
13. Volunteering in Lubango 242
14. The Slave Yards of Benguela 268
15. Luanda: The Improvised City 297
16. “This Is What the World Will Look Like When It Ends” 320
17. What Am I Doing Here? 333