This book's title No Straight Road Takes You There is an evocation and a declaration.
Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places or the landscape is cleared
away - logged graded levelled tunnelled through - but to stick to these roads is to miss
what else is out there. In her writing and activism Rebecca Solnit has sought the pathless
places in order to celebrate indirect and unpredictable consequences and to embrace slowness
and imperfection which she argues are key to understanding the possibilities of change. In
her latest essay collection the award-winning writer explores responses to the climate crisis
as well as reflections on women's rights the fight for democracy the trends in masculinity
and the rise of the far right in the West. Incantatory and poetic positive and engaging these
essays argue for the long-term view and the power of collective action making a case for
seeding change wherever possible and offering us all a path out of the wilderness.
