Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

Book (Collection of Essays), 2019

Premise - A collection of essays about power, and how whoever owns the power dictates reality. History is written by the winners, essentially. While some essays are overtly feminist in a familiar manner for author Rebecca Solnit, others extend wider into territories of race, climate change, and other hot topics that often feel rewritten in history, against the facts, by those in power.


Review - Clearly by the tongue-tied way in which I wrote the premise, I am at a loss for words. There is no possible way I could sum up the state of the world as we know it anywhere as eloquently as Solnit does in this book. This is my magnum opus for her (thus far, as I know she still has a long career ahead of her). Of the three Solnit books I have read recently, this stands out as the best, as well as one of the best nonfiction books I have read in all time.

I think it hits so hard because I read it while it was still fresh. The book came out last year, and discusses recent topics such as the 2016 election, and even the 2020 election as it stood so far when the book was written. It discusses Brett Kavanaugh, the event's of our current president's reign of power, #MeToo and Time's Up, and other current events. I have a habit of reading classics, and when a new book comes out it can sit on my to-do list for years before I ever get around to it. This one jumped the list to the top because I wanted to watch Emma Watson's interview with Rebecca Solnit, and figured I should read the three recommended works first. So yay thank you Emma once again for incentivizing me to learn because it led me to read a book that's actually about current events! As the 2020 election continues to unfold around me, this book hits hard.

Have you ever really thought about the statues erected around a city? And how the majority of them are men? I've realized this, but there is the counterargument of female statues such as Lady Liberty or the Virgin Mary. It never really hit me... these women are not real. Real men get cities and statues named after them. With women, they are almost always recognized by man-made allegorical characters. Real women recognized in history are few and far between.

Have you ever really thought about how women legally have the right to vote, but domestically men have the power, whether in an overtly abusive or a more subtle coercive manner, to manipulate who their wives vote for in elections? This level of cultural voter suppression, beyond the legal barriers of voter suppression, never occurred to me.

Have you ever really thought about how much of the argument for Trump's success is that the working class voted for him, but the definition of "working class" is really limited to the idea of white male middle-of-country coal mining folks? This interpretation of salt-of-the-earth, blue-collar America is valid, no doubt, but so vastly over-represented in the electoral college in terms of a ratio of population to delegates. What about the massive POC working classes that live in inner cities? They vote doesn't have nearly as much weight in our electoral college.

I am full of new information and perspectives and I want everyone to have the opportunity to see these perspectives as well.

This is a book, more than anything, about achieving equity and why we don't yet have it. It's about unconscious bias, fear of change, and mostly defensiveness leading society to want to hear a certain version of history. But sometimes this version is only one side of the story. Other times, it's just plain false.

Despite the horrific display of disparity in the world, this book is fortunately an optimistic one. Solnit details the change that has happened, the new levels of representation and language to represent concepts we never had a word for before (i.e. "sexual harassment"). More change is yet to come and the best of us are spearheading it. (99/100)

Quote - "If you think you're woke, it's because someone woke you up, so thank the human alarm clocks."

What to read for - I honestly cannot pick a favorite essay, so I'll pick a favorite part. I love her allusion to George Orwell and the quote she provides of his "Totalitarianism demands, in fact, a continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth" as she includes in her essay "They Think They Can Bully The Truth"

If you liked this book, I'd recommend Sister Outsider!

Written by Rebecca Solnit
Published by Haymarket Books