Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

Jan 27, 2019 Michael rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, 2019

My full review, as well as my other thoughts on reading, can be found on my blog.

Expansive and engaging, Rebecca Solnits Wanderlust explores the history of walking in the West. Starting with Rousseau and the Romantics, Solnit argues, walking became self-conscious, and against the backdrop of the French Revolution and industrialization, the act started to accrue dynamic, democratic, and subversive cultural meanings it had never before held in Western societies. The author historicizes walking as ...more

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Jan 03, 2008 Venessa rated it it was amazing

Affirmation of Pedestrianism

For those of you who don't know me as well as you think you do, I'll start by saying that I have never owned a car, and have not been behind the wheel of one in over 12 years; I bicycle in nice weather but my preferred mode of transportation is walking.

So, I just finished the book Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit and think it is one of the greatest books ever written. I was partial to two of the last chapters, one about women and walking and the Affirmation of Pedestrianism

For those of you who don't know me as well as you think you do, I'll start by saying that I have never owned a car, and have not been behind the wheel of one in over 12 years; I bicycle in nice weather but my preferred mode of transportation is walking.

So, I just finished the book Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit and think it is one of the greatest books ever written. I was partial to two of the last chapters, one about women and walking and the other about the decline of pedestrianism due to automobilization and suburbanization but really, the whole damn book is great: a work of art from start to finish.

Solnit does exactly what the sub title describes: traces a history of walking from the early philosophers and romantics to modern peripatetics like myself, who are disturbingly and increasingly in decline. In this modern world we inhabit nowadays, I knew walking is considered subversive, nonconformist, and even controversial, yet until I read Wanderlust I didn't realize it was even more so back in the day: walkers were often {and still are} seen as lower and working class because, heaven forbid, why would you choose to walk among and in the filth of the city {or the mud of the country} when you could be enclosed and away from it in a horse drawn carriage or the modern carriage that is called the automobile? Women who walked were often arrested, as no respectable woman would go un-escorted into the mean streets of midnight; some women were thus victims of "surgical rape" as doctors forcibly inserted medical instruments to make sure their hymens were intact and they weren't lying about not being street walkers {throughout the book Solnit peppers her prose with numerous terms that have originated with walking, not just those relating to women who have throughout history tried to take back the night}. Members of the counterculture walked and still walk, from Whitman and Ginsberg, to prolific protesters who march for their numerous causes. Artists use walking to express themselves visually, such as Robert Smithson's 1,500-foot-long Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake.

Famous cities of walkers such as New York and Paris are explored, as well as the entire country of England; famous solitary walkers such as Thoreau and Rousseau are celebrated as well as companion pedestrians such as Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Urban and rural walking and their unique characteristics are covered but not contained.

Inspired by this book, I have checked out books from the library by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and have continued my proud walks around the city of Buffalo, welcoming Spring and impatient for Summer, when my wandering without purpose rambles will become more frequent, as I walk with purpose daily, but it's undeniably more pleasant to walk without purpose in warmer weather. ...more

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Dec 08, 2019 Cecily marked it as did-not-finish · review of another edition

Shelves: landscape-protagonist

I bought this on a whim, after being stunned by the ethereal beauty and insight of A Field Guide to Getting Lost this summer, which I reviewed HERE.

This is good, but more ordinarily so. If you want a literate non-fiction book about the history and philosophy of walking, this may be for you. It turns out that I dont. But its not her; its me.
Hence, this review is just notes on pages 1 to 103 of 291.

Thinking Points

Walking the way we do is uniquely human. Other bipedal creatures have wings or ...more

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Jul 09, 2014 Rachelfm rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction, spl-next-5, every-day-is-a-sensual-adventure, 1000-in-my-thirties, 133-in-2014, 60-non-fiction-books-in-2014

I really wanted to like this book much more than I did, and kept waiting for it to get good. I want to also acknowledge at the outset that it languished on my Kindle for about 8 months as I got through it 1% of the time at a very plodding pace. Whenever I'd be stuck someplace with nothing else to read and go, "Ugh, fine, I'll work on the dang walking book again." I'm not sure I'd have been so committed if it hadn't been one of my Your Next 5 Books at the Seattle Public Library. I originally got I really wanted to like this book much more than I did, and kept waiting for it to get good. I want to also acknowledge at the outset that it languished on my Kindle for about 8 months as I got through it 1% of the time at a very plodding pace. Whenever I'd be stuck someplace with nothing else to read and go, "Ugh, fine, I'll work on the dang walking book again." I'm not sure I'd have been so committed if it hadn't been one of my Your Next 5 Books at the Seattle Public Library. I originally got it because one of my subgoals last year was to read 60 books written by women. Also, as one who has been car-free or car-lite my whole life, I've got some pedestrian street cred and often want to literarily bump fists with my peeps, as it were.

I guess my issues with under-enthusiasm are these:
1) The history of walking seems to start with romanticism. I have uneven feelings about that time, and so it's hard to really jam on that point.
2) There are times when an author's personal experiences and observations on a subject, her own personal encounter with the matter at hand, truly enhance the narrative. In fairness, most of the author's experiences walking describe Paris, San Francisco and the deserts in the American West. I'm not sure that there are three places that I would connect with less on an imaginative level, but I'm sort of a crank. At any rate, I found it a bit distracting to dip into her life after I'd been chewing my cud on the Lake District, so to speak.
a) Writing about walking in Paris almost inevitably results in the injudicious overuse of the word flâneur.
b) Some of the writing about the desert walking was pretty interesting, especially the AFL-CIO strike in Las Vegas and the walk to Los Angeles. However, (cranky) I'm always hyperaware of anything American desert-y that strays into "the crystals led me to a spirit quest with the Hopi" because OMG, the people you run into in hostels in Santa Fe.
3) One of the author's main points is that walking can be a political and feminist act. There was a lot of discussion of reclaiming public space at the pedestrian scale and to move beyond the idea of women who walk are streetwalkers. That's rad. But this book had SUCH as western perspective. I can't help but think that for the majority of the world's women, walking is NOT an empowering act, because the loads of water and firewood that need to be trekked back home have to be done under the power of women at the exclusion of their own economic and intellectual development. The only really non-western examples that come to mind are some eastern European artists who were walking the Great Wall of China.
a)Ugh, also, Philistine alert, but I'm rarely moved by post-modern minimalist performance art. Probably because I'm one of the sheep. But reading about post-modern minimalist performance art about walking was a bit excruciating for my Cro-Magnon brain.
b)Isn't this where you'd get some serious mileage (pun intended) waxing poetically about the Montgomery bus boycotts?
4) Some biology about how walking affects us and the differences in bodies of walkers vs. non-walkers would have been interesting. I remember reading a kinesiology study about how the gaits and strides of African women are different, ostensibly because of carrying heavy loads on their heads.
5) It's also possible that when this book was published nearly 15 years ago that ideas about sidewalks and cul-de-sacs and not driving half a mile to do something and public spaces were a bit more fringe-y than they are today.

I'm sure I'll give Rebecca Solnit another chance; it's possible that this subject has so many ways to be handled that the path she chose didn't appeal to me. Also, she coined the term "mansplaining," so I'm interested in her cultural commentary.
...more

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May 18, 2013 Doreen rated it it was ok

Shelves: for-research, for-work

I expected a lot more from this book and turns out I was terribly disappointed at how superficial and reductive her views of walking are. I don't understand the title: where's the history? It's more of a crib note guide and encomium to the theme of walking as found in Great Books of the Western canon. As soon as I found myself interested in a topic she covered, whether it was the perils of women walking or the role of walking and thinking/writing/philosophizing, I was whisked away like a harried I expected a lot more from this book and turns out I was terribly disappointed at how superficial and reductive her views of walking are. I don't understand the title: where's the history? It's more of a crib note guide and encomium to the theme of walking as found in Great Books of the Western canon. As soon as I found myself interested in a topic she covered, whether it was the perils of women walking or the role of walking and thinking/writing/philosophizing, I was whisked away like a harried mother navigating her child through a crowded supermarket. yes, she seems v. well read but where's the substance, the argument, the understanding of why we should care about concepts/theories/aesthetics/problematics of walking as seen through the eyes of Western writers (predominantly race and class privileged men of letters)? She only touches on how not everyone gets to be a wanderer or even the notion that walking can be used to oppress, torture, and shame. The author's own perambulations also lack depth, development of character, and understanding of place, they are tableau oriented rather than visceral, exploratory, dirty, gritty, shocking, wondrous, or real. They seem all to be placed in retrospect as a method of writing herself into the Western canon. Descriptions are glossy brochures: they tease only to reveal a shallowness of actual experience of place. Well-read she is but Solnit seems to rely on other writers' ideas to coast her through all the varied topics she takes on. The vignettes of her own walking seem completely separate and whimsical and don't ground the reader as they should in the experience of walking; instead,the prose style obfuscates and dis-orients because it is trying too hard to be lyrical and meaningful.

I also dislike the pejorative attitude she has toward the suburbs, communication technologies, car culture, and treadmills. Does she realize what a classist she is? It is an easy target to scoff at people who walk in malls as exercise or go to the gym and use treadmills but it might be better to turn the lens back on one's own freedom to experience walking in Paris as a runaway or camping out in the desert to protest nukes and examine one's own entitlement. Not everyone can live in urban environments nor do they want to. Many new immigrants and working class Americans move to the suburbs to provide better education and opportunities for their chilren--yes it may appear as if the suburbs lack 'culture' in a Matthew Arnold kind of way but surprisingly there are also opportunities for walking and exploring as my own childhood in northern New Jersey attests to. If you read this book, beware of the broad stroke assumptions that underlie much of the discussion. Preferred walking spaces being urban/rural is one of them. that we should take what we know as a walking tradition primarily from canonical writers is another. ...more

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Jun 10, 2017 Marc rated it liked it

Shelves: cultural-history, walking, hiking

I can imagine that some people are disappointed in this book, because it offers no conventional overview of the history of walking. It's more a collection of musings and digressions about all kinds of cultural-historical aspects of our civilization that are directly or indirectly linked with hiking: protest marches as secular successor of pilgrimages, the care for the environment, the harmful effect of suburbanisation, the relationship between female emancipation and hiking, the relationship ...more

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Jun 16, 2018 Debbie Zapata rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dar

This was my second time reading this book, and I feel as ambivalent about it as I did the first time through. There is just so much in here that it feels a bit overwhelming. Here are two of the notes I made while reading:

June 9 ~~ First chapter was about philosophers and walking. A bit dull. Second was about how and why humans began to walk in the first place, and the debate was still raging at the time she wrote. That was more interesting. Now I am on a chapter about pilgrimages, which is This was my second time reading this book, and I feel as ambivalent about it as I did the first time through. There is just so much in here that it feels a bit overwhelming. Here are two of the notes I made while reading:

June 9 ~~ First chapter was about philosophers and walking. A bit dull. Second was about how and why humans began to walk in the first place, and the debate was still raging at the time she wrote. That was more interesting. Now I am on a chapter about pilgrimages, which is another type of walking altogether. And she complains that at a slow pace or just standing still her feet hurt. I hear you, girl! The hardest thing to do is walk at someone else's slower pace.

June 12 ~~ Chapters on walking and philosophy. Chapters on how we began to walk in the first place and what it meant. Chapters on pilgrimages. Chapters on Wordsworth and the beginning of walking as a leisure activity. And yet another chapter about Wordsworth, who seems to have been responsible for many things regarding that movement. But honestly, it is all a bit dry.

I am a walker. Have been since I was a kid and used to zip down to the corner store on Sundays to buy a paper and lug it home. Three mile round trip and wonderful fun. Since then I have walked many more miles for fun, in competitions, to explore, and to keep myself healthy.

And while I can appreciate the author's general idea here, it was very hard to slog through all the information she shared. It was like doing a 6-Day Ultramarathon in an area where the course is a little rockier than is good for you. At first you try to miss the stones but after a time you are tired and end up stomping on them every few strides. It hurts. It's work. And I don't always like to work when I'm walking, or when I'm reading. I have to be in the proper frame of mind to exercise my brain as much as I needed to do for this book. So if I wait until Someday when I am feeling scholarly and intellectual and high-browed, would I like this better?

I did enjoy seeing names of some authors I recognized and others who are on my reading lists. This is a very literary walking book, tracing the history of walking by the writing that has been done about it over the centuries. I cannot imagine the amount of research it took to dig up all of this information and tie it all together. So kudos to Solnit for the work. And thanks are due also because I have been introduced to Dorothy Wordsworth, William's sister who kept journals of all the walking she did. Apparently he swiped many ideas and images from her pages for his poetry, and even though I am not as familiar with his work as I probably should be if I were a true intellectual, I am very interested to read Dorothy's journals and see if I can recognize anything there.

I also appreciated the introduction to New York poet Frank O'Hara, and I have his poems on my lists now too. So I feel I did get some rewards for keeping myself staggering along to the finish line here. Well, almost to the end. my feet and my brain hurt too much to face the rocky fields of those last few chapters.

Maybe Someday I'll give this book one more walk through. Or I might just send it off on a walkabout of its own. We'll see.

...more

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Feb 26, 2012 Erik Graff rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Erik by: Emma Lowes

Shelves: history

Thanks to my upbringing, to summers in the woods and weekend forest walks all year long with Father and the dog, I've always enjoyed walking, particularly in nature, especially over new terrain, but even through the neighborhoods of cities. Thanks to the ageing of my peers and, with such, their increased responsibilies and increasing incidences of disability, I've had less opportunity to do so in company and, so, less inclination. A dog, a good dog, would help, but I live in an apartment, in a Thanks to my upbringing, to summers in the woods and weekend forest walks all year long with Father and the dog, I've always enjoyed walking, particularly in nature, especially over new terrain, but even through the neighborhoods of cities. Thanks to the ageing of my peers and, with such, their increased responsibilies and increasing incidences of disability, I've had less opportunity to do so in company and, so, less inclination. A dog, a good dog, would help, but I live in an apartment, in a city, the cabin in the woods is gone, and having the kind of dog who'd be a good companion would not be appropriate for these urban environs. Thus I borrow dogs and children, if I can get them, and try to find new friends as interested in adventure as I am.

It's not just the walking, nor is it simply the adventure of new routes and new sights, it's also conversation. One can listen to almost anything on a good walk and not become bored--and if the conversation flags, there are always the sights, the impulsive decisions to alter direction or duck into a new storefront. Besides, a good walk is a matter of hours, even a whole day, and is consequently conducive to sufficient treatments of subjects, something which rarely happens in ordinary, chair-bound, oft-distracted conversation.

This book was given me by a cafe friend, cafes being my home-away-from-home and the primary place where I make new acquaintances--and read for that matter. She's done three (she claims more--see note) walks with me, both purposive, neither long enough, but still most appreciated. Out of pity, perhaps with some sympathy, she gave this book to me as a consolation.

Author Solnit understands all this and much more. Wanderlust ends with an appreciation of walking--and indictments of atomized suburban car-culture--but the bulk of it consists of meditations on themes related to walking. There's a history of a sort of one aspect of environmentalism, a history of sorts of parks, of street demonstrations, of street walkers, of peripatetic philosophers and of mountaineering--none of them exhaustive, none of them quite long enough, but all suggestive.

I hadn't, when I received this book, thought to expect much of it. "Walking? What is there to say about walking?" I wondered. Now I wish Solnit had said more, a bit about arctic trudges perhaps, about the travels and travails of the disabled, about the riparian rights of strollers...

Note: In Woody Allen's Annie Hall there's a representation of the respective visits of himself and his girlfriends to their therapists. He complains about the lack of sex. She complains of the constant sex. ...more

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Apr 14, 2012 Michael Morris rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

I know I gave this five stars, but I do have to get my one problem with this book out of the way. Wanderlust, in all that it manages to cover, does not even mention Japanese haibun, a literary form that merges short prose and haiku. This is important because many of these writings came out of long walking tours and travel accounts. Not mentioning Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior seems a crime to me.

That omission out of the way, I can still say that this is a terrific book, covering a lot of ...more

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Dec 07, 2008 Thomas rated it it was ok

I labored through it. I am a walking addict, and expected a more personal connection with the author. While Ms. Solnit did include numerous examples of personal walks, I was not able to hang with her and see the countryside, inner or outer. This is more a book about philosophers and famous literary and artistic personalities that just happened to be walkers.

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Jan 04, 2009 El rated it really liked it

Shelves: lit-crit, cultural-studies-and-other, wanderlust

I don't believe much in New Years' Resolutions as I prefer to do my self-improvement periodically throughout the year and not limit myself to a specific time in which to accomplish a goal. However, we are about 25 days away from moving into a new neighborhood, a safer neighborhood, and I am looking forward to being more active again - my boyfriend bought me a bike for Christmas 2007 and I have yet to be able to take it out, we'll be a few blocks away from a dog park, we can walk to the tennis ...more

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Feb 11, 2018 Max rated it it was amazing

Phenomenal. Discursive, well-read, full of broad and rambling scholarship. Some chapters are literary criticism, some scientific, some urban planning history, some religious. One heartbreaking moment made me realize the book was published in precisely 2000no later, no earlier. Less personal than A Field Guide to Getting Lost, but that's not this book's purpose. ...more

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Dec 16, 2015 Christopher rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, american, 21st-century, audiobooks

More than a history of walking, this is an excuse for Solnit to write about things she's interested in: literature she enjoys, turn of the century prostitutes, urban planning, landscape painting, National Parks, shrubberies. The book itself is an unplanned walk, following trails that often veer off in unexpected directions or circle back to themselves, and thus feels less like a history than a collection of essays inspired by the act of walking.

There are gems to be taken to heart, such as...

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

and...

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors — home, car, gym, office, shops — disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

It makes me want to really enjoy walking. Sometimes I do. I recently moved closer to work and I walk on the pleasant days and when I do that, I get what Solnit is saying, about occupying the world rather than just several disconnected interior pods. Even more so when you take a walk in the woods. When you run out of gas on a highway in the flat part of Colorado, it's frightening how much you feel that you are occupying the world. But in the three-quarters of each Louisville year that are inhabited by terribly high or low temperatures (and being the large, sweaty man that I am), I'm reminded that walking really sucks.

And I know this is the opposite of what I should come away from this book saying, but walking suuuucks. ...more

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Oct 10, 2018 Cheryl Kennedy rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: all readers

Recommended to Cheryl by: Maria Popova

Shelves: favorite, evolution-of-human-walking, dialogue-w-rousseau, recreation-w-nietzsche, natural-history-w-thoreau, pilgrim-stories-w-tolstoy, history-of-walking

"Walking, ideally, is a state of mind in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes finally making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without our being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being lost in our thoughts."

"Wanderlust's real pleasures resemble the pleasure of walking. It doesn't systematically press on toward a goal, but savors detail and varied ...more

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Sep 10, 2018 Aravindakshan Narasimhan rated it it was amazing

Never thought walking had such a history. We may be familiar with gandhi, martin Luther king's marches. Various protest for various reasons, but the cultural phenomenon of walking from its supposedly Greek origins in peripatetic schools through aristocratic garden walks, to countryside walks by Rousseau, Wordsworth , Thoreau, to latest walkathon it has changed its form and metamorphosed completely. Pilgrimages of christians in new mexico ( santa fe) , paseo and corso ( Spanish speaking parts of Never thought walking had such a history. We may be familiar with gandhi, martin Luther king's marches. Various protest for various reasons, but the cultural phenomenon of walking from its supposedly Greek origins in peripatetic schools through aristocratic garden walks, to countryside walks by Rousseau, Wordsworth , Thoreau, to latest walkathon it has changed its form and metamorphosed completely. Pilgrimages of christians in new mexico ( santa fe) , paseo and corso ( Spanish speaking parts of America and italian respectively ) , flaneurs of Parisian world, mountaineering in sierra niveda to protect the nature from government's so called development agenda, surrealist literature on walking paris to map the body of city through as the female personification, shugendo sect of Buddhism ( banned in 19th century ) - which propounds a philosophy of walking round the mountain as a process to go through six realms of existence, fight for free space in privatised lands by landowners in Uk of 19th century, female vs male history of walking, how suburban planning embodies in it an aversion for a free space to walk( this was one of the best chapters as in it opened my mind to my own surrounding, never saw suburban in this light which is true too)..

This is a just a few drops from the book.
Starting from paleontology, biology , philosophy , history, literature, politics and many other diverse fields this book investigates the declining phenomenon which has defined the humanity for its entire breath.

P.S: As myself a bit of romantic and flaneur type, While this whole week I got up early and strolled my dull and bustling locality early morning and discovered idyllic sites which evoked the peace of nature in me ( the crimson red sunrise falling on the river as I first discovered the place) as well the dull suburban spaces ( very near to the above, the above is anomally perhaps) which intimidates walkers even as early as 6 am.
Also paced back and forth in the home( like Wittgenstein and Wordsworth and child Kierkegaard) daily while reading the book , to the extent that only 2 hours at the maximum were spent in sitting. So that I could orient myself to the rhythm of the topic of the book.

While walking for hours together
You body rejoices the momentary standing
While the body is standing without end
You yearn and bask when the moment allows you to sit
When you sit for hours together
You may want to lie back and rest
And then ?

I will leave you with a quote:

A few years earlier another insurrection found a square for its stage. The saga of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began when these women started to notice each other at the police stations and government offices, making the same fruitless inquiries after children who had been “disappeared” by agents of the brutal military junta that seized power in 1976. “Secrecy,” writes Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, “was a hallmark of the junta’s Dirty War. . . . In Argentina the abductions were carried out beneath a veneer of normalcy so that there would be no outcry, so that the terrible reality would remain submerged and elusive even to the families of the abducted.” Mostly homemakers with little education and no political experience, these women came to realize that they had to make the secret public, and they pursued their cause with a stunning lack of regard for their own safety. On April 30, 1977, fourteen mothers went to the Plaza de Mayo in the center of Buenos Aires. It was the place where Argentinean independence had been proclaimed in 1810 and where Juan Perón had given his populist speeches, a plaza at the heart of the country. Sitting there was, a policeman shouted, tantamount to holding an illegal meeting, and so they began walking around the obelisk in the center of the plaza.
There and then, wrote a Frenchman, the generals lost their first battle and the Mothers found their identity. It was the plaza that gave them their name, and their walks there every Friday that made them famous. “Much later,” writes Bouvard, “they described their walks as marches, not as walking, because they felt that they were marching toward a goal and not just circling aimlessly. As the Fridays succeeded one another and the numbers of Mothers marching around the plaza increased, the police began to take notice. Vanloads of policemen would arrive, take names, and force the Mothers to leave.” Attacked with dogs and clubs, arrested and interrogated, they kept returning to perform this simple act of remembrance for so many years that it became ritual and history and made the name of the plaza known around the world. They marched carrying photographs of those children mounted like political placards on sticks or hung around their neck, and wearing white kerchiefs embroidered with the names of their disappeared children and the dates of their disappearances (later they were embroidered instead, “Bring Them Back Alive”).
“They tell me that, while they are marching they feel very close to their children,” wrote the poet Marjorie Agosin, who walked with them. “And the truth is, in the plaza where forgetting is not allowed, memory recovers its meaning.” For years these women taking the national trauma on a walk were the most public opposition to the regime. By 1980 they had created a network of mothers around the country, and in 1981 they began the first of their annual twenty-four-hour marches to celebrate Human Rights Day (they also joined religious processions around the country). “By this time the Mothers were no longer alone during their marches; the Plaza was swarming with journalists from abroad who had come to cover the strange phenomenon of middle-aged woman marching in defiance of a state of siege.” When the military junta fell in 1983, the Mothers were honored guests at the inauguration of the newly elected president, but they kept up their weekly walks counterclockwise around the obelisk in the Plaza de Mayo, and the thousands who had been afraid before joined them. They still walk counterclockwise around the tall obelisk every Thursday.

Post P.S ( first time came across the word in this book): I wish I had a written a detailed review. This book deserves one. ...more

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Aug 28, 2016 Sunny rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

I loved this book. If I was told 20 years ago that 20 years later I would be reading a book about the history of walking and giving it 5 stars I would have told my future self to get a life! The book is a study of walking from the past to the present. It looked at walking in a number of different angles (walking as a form of demonstration, walking for pleasure, fitness, walking as art etc) but ultimately it made me get of my butt and do some walking myself much to my wifes annoyance who has been I loved this book. If I was told 20 years ago that 20 years later I would be reading a book about the history of walking and giving it 5 stars I would have told my future self to get a life! The book is a study of walking from the past to the present. It looked at walking in a number of different angles (walking as a form of demonstration, walking for pleasure, fitness, walking as art etc) but ultimately it made me get of my butt and do some walking myself much to my wife’s annoyance who has been telling me to do the same things for years! This is what I love about books like these; they make you act / react and in that they change you. The book was really well written and very easy to read. Rebecca is a clearly gifted writer. The book covered other interesting topic areas such as the link between thinking and walking, the use of walking by poets and great writers, labyrinths, gardens, mountain walking, walking clubs, and walking in cities not designed for walking, night walkers, walking in gay Paris and treadmills. Some of my best bits from the book:
• GM Trevelyan said that “I have 2 doctors, my left leg and my right.”
• A lot of large American cities are becoming more and more focussed around commercial activities and where cities would have plazas at the centre which encouraged walking and were designed in the past with the pedestrians in mind, the rise of the automobiles has led to the eradication of these walking zones. Where people could walk from one place to another and meet and interact as we have been designed to do, we have now been replaced with automobiles who only beep at each other and occasionally flash a light in anger.
• The Mothers of Plaza Mayo in Argentina was an exquisite example of the power of walking and the effects that had on the country and even globally now. When a brutal military junta had seized power in Argentina in 1976 a lot of children started to go missing. On April 30 1977 a group of 14 mothers gathered in the plaza de mayo in the centre of Buenos Aires and began walking around an obelisk in the centre. They would get intimidated and even arrested by the junta police but they didn’t give up and slowly over time their anti-clockwise walking in the Plaza attracted more and more mothers. They came there every Friday and now their walk is known around the world and they still walk around there even though the junta fell many years ago.
• Women in Greek times were not apparently allowed to walk as much as the men were. It says that women were thought to lack self-control and could not maintain secure boundaries for themselves which was therefore controlled by the physical walls in which they were contained. Roman women on the other hand were given a lot more freedom and tended to have a much greater role in society. It said that women in Greek times, were not able to maintain these internal boundaries because of their fluid sexuality which endlessly overflowed and disrupted not only themselves but men also. This sounded partly Islamic in the thinking and I couldn’t help thinking that the walls of the house in Greece would have been the equivalent of the Burkini today.
• On 15 September 1830, the first steam engine took off between Manchester and Liverpool. I find it hard to believe but on this pivotal day a member of parliament was killed and run down on the opening ceremony!
• The most mind blowing story of the whole book was about the performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay. They both started at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and had initially decided to meet at the centre of the 4000 km distance and get married but their relationship had deteriorated so they decided to meet at the centre and then go their separate ways. The walk took place in 1988. They didn’t meet again till march 31st 2010, 22 years later, when this happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg...

Stunning book; massively recommened. ...more

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Jul 16, 2017 Shira rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Edit 11-01'18: make that 3 * for sure! After reading another book, partly about walking, that used Solnits book as a source & inspiration, I couldn't help not to think about this book and value all that research that was done.

Unfortunately I'm quite happy to be finished with this book. I won't get into much detail of all that Rebecca Solnit discusses here. Parts were interesting and fascinating, sure. Especially how walking can be, and is used as political and social criticism (and how the Edit 11-01'18: make that 3 * for sure! After reading another book, partly about walking, that used Solnits book as a source & inspiration, I couldn't help not to think about this book and value all that research that was done.

Unfortunately I'm quite happy to be finished with this book. I won't get into much detail of all that Rebecca Solnit discusses here. Parts were interesting and fascinating, sure. Especially how walking can be, and is used as political and social criticism (and how the act of walking (I can't even give a good definition of what is implied by 'walking' here) is threatened by many factors).

While reading Wanderlust I quickly realised that maybe I wasn't all too eager to read about the history of walking to start with. That doesn't help to get through a very information dense book! I wanted to abandon it many times but purely to proof to myself I could finish this (and because I thought it was a waste to stop halfway... why?), I finished. And honestly, I'm not unhappy about that, afterwards. For I've came across new facts, writers, and ideas - and for that, it was worth a read.

I blame my not particularly enjoying the read also for how I read (historical) non-fiction. Word for word, slow, wanting to understand every single phrase (without willing to look up every unknown word - maybe I should). It makes me focus too much on things that might've been clear to me had I read quicker, trying to just grab the main points.

Hopefully I'll find myself more comfortably reading books like this in the future. For Wanderlust passed by more as a chore than as a source of new information. Mostly. Some things stuck. If not, I don't know what I would've done with myself (probably go on just the same).

2* (plus a little) - but please go ahead and read it! (If you're interested in the (mostly social and western) history of walking.)

Something I thought beautiful and want to remember:

"[...] In 1985 and 1986, the Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum used the street as a performance space, stenciling footprints containing the word unemployed down streets in Scheffield, as if to make visible the sad secrets of passersby in that economically devastated city [...]" p.273 ...more

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Aug 09, 2017 Desi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sex-and-gender, books-i-own, nature-writing

At last! (Of course it took me a few days to be able to mark it read as well.)

I appreciate this book so much, in no small part because it brought together so many different facets of my own life and how I think about the spaces I move about in the world. One night, last week, as I was nearing the end, I put the book down and turned out the light, and so many thoughts were swirling in my head that I couldn't fall asleep.

My internal orientation as a walker didn't happen until I was a young adult, At last! (Of course it took me a few days to be able to mark it read as well.)

I appreciate this book so much, in no small part because it brought together so many different facets of my own life and how I think about the spaces I move about in the world. One night, last week, as I was nearing the end, I put the book down and turned out the light, and so many thoughts were swirling in my head that I couldn't fall asleep.

My internal orientation as a walker didn't happen until I was a young adult, and I didn't understand it at the time, but while I was on my semester abroad in Moscow, a fellow student talked about how he just liked to pick a neighborhood or area of the city and walk it. I thought, what an interesting idea, and I tried it. And since then my most favorite thing to do in a city is to simply walk it and to be in it. When I have been able to travel for work, to NY, London, Montreal, Philadelphia, I use what free time I have simply to walk. But it is not just the city either, and this book engaged me for the way it framed my orientation toward being in and walking through natural environments as the result of a cultural evolution. I'm not doing any of Solnit's insights justice in my early morning ramblings, frantically trying to get these thoughts down in the space between when my son wakes up, F emerges from the shower, and the house guest rambles upstairs to chat. So I will leave my thoughts with a few passages I flagged along the way.

"A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience, but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation: one is mildly disconnected because one is walking, not because one is incapable of connecting." (p. 24)

"As the walls come down, the proposes that there is already an order in nature and that it is in harmony with the 'natural' society enjoying such gardens. The growing taste for ruins, mountains, torrents, for situations provoking fear and melancholy, and for artwork about all these things that suggests that life had become so placidly pleasant for England's privileged that they could bring back as entertainment the terrors people had once strived so hard to banish." (p. 91)

-->N.B. HG is now sitting with me at the table going on about his reading habits and his lit professor in college even though I am typing and trying my best to focus on the thing that I am doing. But it now appears my detached state and not-so-timely-nods have compelled him elsewhere. But dammit, the cat is now sitting right next to my hand and will likely scratch me .... AND now my kid is awake.....

"There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers ...more

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Mar 31, 2017 Yigitalp Ertem rated it liked it

Shelves: essay, audiobooks

The book starts with 24 epigraphs, you estimate how many references would be given in the actual essays.

Its the far most comprehensive text Ive read on the history of walking. The last collection of essays Ive read was David Le Bretons In Praise of Walking which cannot draw near to Solnits book. She contains and surpasses Le Breton.

Wanderlust starts with a pretty subjective form in the first chapter where Solnit opens up her personal passion for walking as an action in her personal life that The book starts with 24 epigraphs, you estimate how many references would be given in the actual essays.

It’s the far most comprehensive text I’ve read on the history of walking. The last collection of essays I’ve read was David Le Breton’s In Praise of Walking which cannot draw near to Solnit’s book. She contains and surpasses Le Breton.

Wanderlust starts with a pretty subjective form in the first chapter where Solnit opens up her personal passion for walking as an action in her personal life that reaches up to the anti-nuclear protests, spatio-temporal contemplations, resistance against productivity-freak society, critique of anti-democratic city planning that subjugates the public spaces and coop people up in private ones. However, there were so many descriptions and prose about the roads Solnit walks which made me think of the rest of the book as a referenced-travelogue which combines some attributions to the famous walkers while telling her own, personal walking history.

I noticed that I was wrong, as the book unwraps, Solnit leaps from the philosophers to wanderers; history of gardens (one of my favourite historiography as a non-European) to mountain tops; walking-related record holders to marches, protests, pilgrims; from the evolutionary discourses on walking humans (weirdest part); from Dickens to Abramovic; combinations of trains-cars-planes and suburbs-sun tanning-treadmills, from New Mexico to England and then to Paris and finally reaches Las Vegas. Solnit’s historical analyses of walking in relation to class, gender, mode of production gives great insights about how we think about walking today and what are the sources of these ideas.

The hazard of that wide and loaded compilation is chucking away the reader with some subjectively non-interesting passages. For example, the parts about mountaineering did not interest me that much because I’m mostly interested in urban walks. Nevertheless, someone else may think the opposite and the reader always has the right to skip -which I didn’t.

Last but not least, I enjoyed and learned a lot while reading Solnit’s feminist interventions after referencing twenty male authors about a subject. First she criticizes the authors with a witty and dark tone and proceeds with a political, historical and intellectual analysis of the era where referenced authors live and produce their ideas. The part where she criticizes and makes fun of the authors who both love walking and preaching sermons to the readers (i.e. ‘one should always walk alone’) and the pages where she subverts male authors’ memoirs (Kerouac) by replacing them with a female wanderer are exhilarating.

With a hope to encounter with Solnit in a crowded, rainwashed, neon-lit city at night, ...more

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Aug 28, 2019 Leah Rachel von Essen rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Wanderlust: A History of Walking is a simply magical book by Rebecca Solnit tracing the concept of walking across disciplines, from philosophy to city planning to biology (how did we become bipedal anyway, and why?) Solnit discusses everything from the pilgrimage to the march, studying how weve conceptualized walking, wandering, exploring, from competitive drives to courting to a specific connection to a landscape to protesting and collective action. She discusses how women are fundamentally ...more

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Nov 14, 2017 Magdelanye rated it really liked it

Shelves: earth-studies, creative-process, essays, cross-canada-challenge

Anyone truly possessed by wanderlust will find a compelling companion in the slightly rambunctious, delightful perambulation through the archaeology of walking. RS strikes a crisp rhythm, interlacing backstories, personal anecdote and historical reference, never lingering overlong but leaving intriguing signposts for the interested reader to follow.

I suppose I could sigh over routes not covered, but by the end of this journey I felt enriched and glad for the erudite and generous company.

I did ...more

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Apr 25, 2017 Sunil rated it it was amazing

An amazing testament to and on Walking. Perhaps the best book on walking I have read.

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Aug 18, 2014 KimberlyRose rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fic

Attracted to this title because I'm a committed, contented walker, one who is anti-suburbia and never drives, I ordered it from my library straightaway. I wouldn't say I was disappointed, but I was bored more times than engaged by this author's narration style and views, and often her selected topics were so specific to her locales as to appeal only to locals or those interested in visiting.

Topics are vast and, depending on the personal interests of each individual reader, range from fascinating ...more

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Aug 23, 2009 Jeff rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

The best part of this book is the early section, which covers the topic of walking in philosophy and literature. Things degrade and wander a bit as things go on, and Solnit's politics start to become obtrusive - she got into thinking about walking as a part of "nuclear freeze" activities, and late in the book is an entire section of abuse directed at suburbs; besides the fact that yes, suburbs are more difficult to walk, it's not really fully at place in this book.

Tyler Cowen noted while reading ...more

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Jun 22, 2015 Stephen Goldenberg rated it it was amazing

If there's one thing I enjoy as much as reading, it's walking, so a book about the history of walking is right up my street. Although, this is not so much a history (at least in chronological terms), more a gently meandering wander through both the highways and bye ways of the subject. And you are travelling with a very erudite enthusiast. So, we go by way of walking philosophers (Rousseau and Kierkegard), obviously Wordsworth and the romantics, a con side ration of the various theories of how, ...more

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Feb 23, 2009 Risa rated it it was amazing

i start reading this & then i stop becuase it creates an unbearable urge to walk. I think this is the consumate book for the walker/thinker/synesthesia (sp?) stricken saunterer.

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Sep 28, 2019 Ken-ichi rated it really liked it

Shelves: snoot, history

I managed to read fifteen pages of this book on several occasions without gaining enough momentum to continue, and now, having read it with ever-growing enthusiasm, I wonder what my problem was and how many other great things I've omitted for want of the least speck of commitment. If you have a little commitment to spare and you, like me, have ever been warned about the dangers of walking and reading at the same time, you should probably give this one a try.

Some Things

p. 5 "doing nothing is hard ...more

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Dec 29, 2019 PhebeAnn rated it it was ok

Shelves: history, non-fiction, audible

2.5 stars. I just didnt find this book as interesting as I thought I would. It is an extended meditation on walking as a mode of transportation, spiritual practice, protest, artistic form, athletic activity, measures of social status and more. I liked the *idea* of this book. I love to walk and I had romantic visions of myself listening to this book on audiobook while walking, which I did. Its written competently enough (is verbosely) and there were parts of it I really enjoyed (debates within ...more

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Apr 23, 2019 Robert rated it it was amazing

Shelves: shoulda-read-earlier

History of the conceptualization, idea, & geography of walking. Begins with early modern walking, "rambling" , promenading, pacing, & strolling. Discusses spiritual, political, practical, & even artistic aspects of walking. This is a book I should have read 20 years ago when it first came out, especially the discussions of the political roles of walking or marching & about the modern view of walking's "obsolescence", & the modern city planning decisions that flowed from that ...more

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Jan 17, 2018 Andrew rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology-and-human-behaviour, hobbies

As someone who takes every opportunity to walk, in part as a way to keep fit and as something I find makes me more meditative, I was very surprised to learn that so much could be said about it. But in "Wanderlust: A History of Walking" the author, Rebecca Solnit talks it in relation to the development of early human ancestors, politics, protest and civil disobedience, social status and much more. It has also given the author an opportunity to cover topics which she is very much interested in.

She ...more

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