Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)

by Rebecca Solnit

Overview

“[A] call to arms that takes on a range of social and political problems in America—from racism and misogyny to climate change and Donald Trump” (Poets & Writers).
 
National Book Award Longlist
Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the Foreword INDIE Editor’s Choice Prize for Nonfiction
 
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including the international bestseller Men Explain Things to Me. Called “the voice of the resistance” by the New York Times, she has emerged as an essential guide to our times, through incisive commentary on feminism, violence, ecology, hope, and everything in between.
 
In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, “with so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later.” To get to the root of these American crises, she contends that “to acknowledge this state of war is to admit the need for peace,” countering the despair of our age with a dose of solidarity, creativity, and hope.
 
“Solnit’s exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy.” —Elle
 
“Solnit is careful with her words (she always is) but never so much that she mutes the infuriated spirit that drives these essays.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Solnit [is] a powerful cultural critic: as always, she opts for measured assessment and pragmatism over hype and hysteria.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Essential reading for anyone living in America today.” —The Brooklyn Rail

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608469475
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	02/13/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	166
Sales rank:	976,762
File size:	791 KB

About the Author

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books The Mother of All Questions, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s.

Table of Contents

Armpit Wax
American Emotions
Ideology of Isolation
Naïve Cynicism
In Praise of Preaching to the Choir
Facing the Furies
American Edges
Death by Gentrification
Bird in a Cage
coda: Injustice
Delayed
Katrina Ten Years Later
The Light from Standing Rock
Monument Wars
Monument to the Unknown DV Victim
Homelessness essay
City of Women
Abolish High School
Electoral Obscenities
Tyranny of the Minority
The Loneliness of Donald Trump
Milestones in Misogyny
Every Election Is a Disaster Movie
Nevertheless, Hope
On Indirect Effects (Guardian, March 2017)

Editorial Reviews

08/13/2018
In this thought-provoking series of political essays, Solnit (The Mother of All Questions) attempts to diagnose the present maladies of American culture. These afflictions include a preference for outrage instead of dialogue, police brutality and the mass incarceration of African-American men, and gentrification and economic inequality. The most trenchantly addressed problem is that of American isolationism, a slippery slope, as Solnit explains: “If you begin by denying social and ecological systems, then you end by denying the reality of facts, which are... part of a network of systematic relationships among language, physical reality, and the record.” Solnit argues throughout that truthful language is vital, and that “one of the crises of the moment is linguistic,” thanks in large part to misleading speech by President Trump. He is described as suffering from a malady himself, one contracted when one is constantly surrounded by sycophants and deprived of normal human interaction and “the most rudimentary training in dealing with setbacks.” (Solnit does not offer these as excuses, merely explanations.) The collection ends with essays outlining the most successful practices of journalists and activists fighting against injustice, inequality, and ignorance. These in particular indicate what makes Solnit such a powerful cultural critic: as always, she opts for measured assessment and pragmatism over hype and hysteria. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A searing and super smart call-to-arms that takes on a range of social and political problems in America—from racism and misogyny to climate change and Donald Trump—Call Them by Their True Names features Solnit’s signature wit, humor, honesty, and incisive commentary, and beneath it all, a focus on progress and hope.”
—Poets & Writers

“Solnit [is] a powerful cultural critic: as always, she opts for measured assessment and pragmatism over hype and hysteria.”
—Publishers Weekly


“Solnit is careful with her words (she always is) but never so much that she mutes the infuriated spirit that drives these essays.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

“Rebecca Solnit is a treasure.”
—Marketplace

“Solnit’s exquisite essays move between the political and the personal, the intellectual and the earthy.”
—ELLE

“Rebecca Solnit is the voice of the resistance.”
—New York Times Magazine

"No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium."
—Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org

“Rebecca Solnit is essential feminist reading.”
—The New Republic

From the Publisher

As the audiobook title suggests, essayist Rebecca Solnit is not interested in pretense or adulteration. Too much is at stake, particularly related to America's political climate when considering issues of social justice, gender and racial equality, and the environment. Similar to the essays themselves, narrator Cassandra Campbell is unrelenting in her steadiness, and her understated performance offers a perfect counterweight to the challenging themes and ideas. Solnit's essays are political and provocative, sometimes sobering, sometimes infuriating, and always resolute in their underlying exhortation for more awareness and more justice. Interestingly, to the attuned and politically allied listener, Campbell's even modulation may actually increase the vitality of the essays—and by extension, the consternation of the listener. A judicious pairing. A.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2018 - AudioFile