A Field Guide to Getting Lost

With such acclaimed books as River of Shadowsand Wanderlust, activist and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit has emerged as one of the most original and penetrating writers at work today. Her brilliant new book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is about the stories we use to navigate our way through the world and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves or losing ourselves. Written as a series of autobiographical essays, it draws on emblematic moments and...
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With such acclaimed books as River of Shadowsand Wanderlust, activist and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit has emerged as one of the most original and penetrating writers at work today. Her brilliant new book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is about the stories we use to navigate our way through the world and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves or losing ourselves. Written as a series of autobiographical essays, it draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit’s own life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. While deeply personal, Solnit’s book is not just a memoir, since her own stories link up with everything from the captivity narratives of early American immigrants to endangered species to the use of the color blue in Renaissance painting—not to mention encounters with tortoises, monks, punk rockers, mountains, deserts, and the movie Vertigo. The result is a distinctive, stimulating voyage of discovery that only a writer of Solnit’s caliber and curiosity could produce, a book that will appeal not only to her growing legion of admirers but also to the readers of Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, and Annie Dillard.