Forrest’s Reviews > A Field Guide to Getting Lost > Status Update

The slowest essay in the book, and the last, is focused on the desert tortoise. Go figure.

Even the most tentative of Solnit's essays are good, if not great.

Listening to Jean Michel Jarre while reading that last chapter was trippy as all heck. The fact that I'm coming down with something added to the hypnognosis.

The paragraph on this page about the view as one climbs a mountain is wrought with meaning. One of the greatest implied metaphors I'very ever read. Humbling insight about sight and humility.

This is hitting some buttons of my childhood as a wandering Air Force brat. Profound and poignant. This should be an interesting review to write . . .

Ouch. The paragraph about the permanence of place is a knife to the heart of this wandering Air Force brat. Some of the places of my youth no longer exist, entire bases the size of small cities buried in ash or completely transmogrified from end to end. This kind of hurts. Kicked me right in the feels.

The pages about butterflies, pp. 81-83, are moving and profound. One or more of those paragraphs are going into my review. Absolutely beautiful!

Youch. What a somber, desolate, yet moving essay about Solnit's family history. Not at all what I was expecting in this volume. There's a slow moving power, like a whispering bulldozer, in this essay.

Solnit's definition of two ways to interpret "lost" is poetic brilliance. I shall definitely be quoting this in my review.

Solnit makes a good argument for being lost, but not stupid lost, more intentionally lost.