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Title:
After the ruins 1906 and 2006 : rephotographing the San Francisco earthquake and fire

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How exactly has San Francisco's urban landscape changed in the hundred years since the earthquake and cataclysmic firestorms that destroyed three-quarters of the city in 1906? For this rephotography project, bringing past and present into dynamic juxtaposition, photographer Mark Klett has gone to the same locations pictured in forty-five historic photographs taken in the days following the 1906 earthquake and fires and precisely duplicated each photograph's vantage point. The result is a comparison that challenges our preconceptions about time, history, and culture. This publication accompanies an exhibition at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006 features a vivid essay by noted environmental historian Philip Fradkin on the events surrounding and following the 1906 earthquake, which he describes as "the equivalent of an intensive, three-day bombing raid, complete with many tons of dynamite that acted as incendiary devices." A lyrical essay by acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit considers the meaning of ruins, resurrection, and the evolving geography and history of San Francisco.

Title:
A Paradise built in hell

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In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis.

Title:
Orwell's roses

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Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell’s life explores his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers encounter the photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her Stalinism, Stalin’s obsession with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s critique of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.

Title:
Storming the gates of paradise

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Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual. Storming the Gates of Paradise, an anthology of her essential essays from the past ten years, takes the reader from the Pyrenees to the U.S.

Title:
Inside out

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A meditation on the dilemmas and desires for home that combines the writings of art critic and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit with painter Stefan Kürten’s lush images of domestic interiors, buildings and landscapes. Solnit reflects on emotional privatization, real-estate fetishism, and aesthetic pleasure, while Kürten’s paintings of stale bourgeois interiors and suburban homes project a dogged attempt to make life perfect, at least on the surface. His armchairs, teapots and planter boxes suggest that we are living in a peculiar state of safety and bliss. Together, the text and images question the equation of ideal houses with ideal lives, the images that shape our perception of childhood, and our notion of a fulfilled adulthood.

Title:
Hope in the dark: untold histories, wild possibilities

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Summary:
When Hope in the Dark was first published, it resonated with readers everywhere. In these days of cultural and political pessimism, Rebecca Solnit's impassioned defense of hope is both necessary and inspiring. Now, in this new, significantly expanded edition, Solnit explores the political territory of America following George Bush's re-election, and the ongoing consequences of the war in Iraq.

Title:
A book of migrations: some passages in Ireland

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A Book of Migrations is a postcolonial revision of conventional travel literature. In her journey through Ireland, Rebecca Solnit portrays in microcosm a history made up of great tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism, and tourism. Her observations carve a new route through Ireland's history, literature and landscape.

Title:
A field guide to getting lost

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The virtues of being open to new and transformative experiences are rhapsodized but not really illuminated in this discursive and somewhat gauzy set of linked essays. Cultural historian Solnit, an NBCC award winner for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, allows the subject of getting lost to lead her where it will, from early American captivity narratives to the avant-garde artist Yves Klein. She interlaces personal and familial histories of disorientation and reinvention, writing of her Russian Jewish forebears' arrival in the New World, her experiences driving around the American west and listening to country music, and her youthful immersion in the punk rock demimonde. Unfortunately, the conceit of embracing the unknown is not enough to impart thematic unity to these essays; one piece ties together the author's love affair with a reclusive man, desert fauna, Hitchcock's Vertigo and the blind seer Tiresias in ways that will indeed leave readers feeling lost. Solnit's writing is as abstract and intangible as her subject, veering between oceanic lyricism ("Blue is the color of longing for the distance you never arrive in") and pensées about the limitations of human understanding ("Between words is silence, around ink whiteness, behind every map's information is what's left out, the unmapped and unmappable") that seem profound but are actually banal once you think about them.

Title:
Hollow city: the siege of San Francisco and the crisis of American urbanism

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$25.95
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Summary:
''Hollow City'' surveys San Francisco's transformation—skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the poor; the homogenization of the city's architecture, industries and population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its sites of civic memory.

Title:
Inifinite cities: a trilogy of Atlases. San Francisco, New Orleans, New York

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$100.00
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Summary:
In the past decade, Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker, and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro—aided by local writers, artists, historians, urbanists, ethnographers, and cartographers—have compiled three atlases that have radically changed the way we think about place. Each atlas provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of a city—San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York—as experienced by its different inhabitants, replete with the celebrations and contradictions that make up urban life.