A sequel of sorts to Hope in the Dark. Solnit takes the last sixty-odd years — her own lifetime — and lays out how completely the underlying beliefs have shifted on race, gender, sexuality, disability, the environment, and what nature even is, arguing that the current ugliness is an old order fighting its own obsolescence rather than a return to it. Nine chapters, short, and specific: Land returned to Indigenous people in California, dams coming out of the Klamath and salmon coming back, the energy shift, the ideas that were unsayable in 1970 and are ordinary now. Her point is that amnesia is what makes change look impossible.
The Beginning Comes After the End