A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit)

Press, Joy. "Wander Woman: An offbeat intellectual explores urban ruins, country music, Hitchcock's Vertigo—and grandma," Village Voice, 28 June 2005.

Although the title pronounces this a field guide, it's closer to a walkabout. Solnit's essays sweep through myriad varieties of loss, from objects to memories to love, with plenty of slippage between the categories. She believes that losing things is intrinsic to human life, a never ending process of abandonment and discovery. "Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names," Solnit proposes. "This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery." Solnit's writing switches gracefully between these two modes of perception—between melancholy regret at what's been discarded (Hollow City documented the displacement of bohemian San Francisco in the dotcom era) and fragile optimism (Hope in the Dark rallies around the power of grassroots activism).