Storming the Gates of Paradise
Landscapes for Politics

Rebecca Solnit has made a vocation of journeying into difficult territory and reporting back, as an environmentalist, antiglobalization activist, and public intellectual. This work represents developments in Solnit's thinking and offers you a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.

Her introduction sets the tone and the book's overarching themes as she describes Thoreau, leaving the jail cell where he had been confined for refusing to pay war taxes and proceeding directly to his favorite huckleberry patch. In this way she links pleasure to politics, brilliantly demonstrating that the path to paradise has often run through prison. These startling insights on current affairs, politics, culture, and history, always expressed in Solnit's pellucid and graceful prose, constantly revise our views of the otherwise ordinary and familiar. Illustrated throughout, "Storming the Gates of Paradise" represents recent developments in Solnit's thinking and offers the reader a panoramic world view enriched by her characteristically provocative, inspiring, and hopeful observations.

List of Photographs Introduction: Prisons and Paradises
1. Uneven Terrain: The West The Red Lands The Postmodern Old West, or the Precession of Cowboys and Indians The Struggle of Dawning Intelligence: Creating, Revising, and Recognizing Native American Monuments The Garden of Merging Paths
2. Borders and Crossers A Route in the Shape of a Question Thirty-Nine Steps Across the Border and Back Nonconforming Uses: Teddy Cruz on Both Sides of the Border
3. Trouble Below: Mining, Water, and Nuclear Waste The Price of Gold, the Value of Water Meanwhile Back at the Ranch Poison Pictures
4. Reaching for the Sky Excavating the Sky Drawing the Constellations Hugging the Shadows Justice by Moonlight
5. Landscapes of Resistance and Repression Fragments of the Future: The FTAA in Miami Jailbirds I Have Loves Making It Home: Travels outside the Fear Economy Mirror in the Street Liberation Conspiracies Sontag and Tsunami
6. Gardens and Wildernesses Every Corner Is Alive: Eliot Porter as an Environmentalist and an Artist The Botanical Circus, or Adventures in American Gardening A Murder of Ravens: On Globalized Species
7. Women's Place Tangled Banks and Clear-Cut Examples Seven Stepping Stones down the Primrose Path: A Talk at a Conference on Landscape and Gender Other Daughters, Other American Revolutions
8. Infernal Museums California Comedy, or Surfing with Dante The Wal-Mart Biennale The Silence of the Lambswool Cardigans Locked Horns
9. City at the End of the World The Orbits of Earthly Bodies San Francisco: The Metamorphosis The Heart of the City The Ruins of Memory Gaping Questions
Coda: The Pacific Seashell to Ear
Acknowledgments Notes Permissions Index