 "Shuddup and walk!" | 2009-08-02 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1A5NC832GZBD4 |
This is not so much a "History of walking", but is rather "The author thinking and talking about other people thinking and talking about walking, either their own, or someone else's".
At least three levels of removal from people actual walking anywhere and seeing or doing anything. An academic's idea: armchair exercise.
The book is nicely written, pleasant reading, with all sorts of learned bits and pieces. However, if you're looking for accounts of people actually walking, hiking, exploring, touring, etc., that is: actually doing something and not just cogitating about it, better look somewhere else.
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 "wonderful perspective" | 2008-04-05 |
| - Reviewed By erikthompsonmu |
| This is a new way to look at cultural history and the way we live our lives that is especially relevant to our present day car culture. Wordsworth is estimated to have walked 170,000 miles in his life and sparked a cottage industry of walking tours in England and Europe. Solnit makes me realize that new cultural turns and socially revolutionary ways of living and thinking seem to coincide with new approaches to walking the land. |
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 "A Walk to Forget" | 2007-12-05 |
| - Reviewed By aribro |
| Let me preface this somewhat negative review by stating that I come from a family of walking enthusiasts and I myself am an avid collector of all literature dealing with personal locomotion. I must therefore judge this effort via comparison to the great pantheon of walking literature and not merely as an isolated effort. If you are a walking neophyte this book may well be the catalyst that sparks your interest for further study but I would not suggest this work as a thorough or exhaustive study of two legged ambulation. Indeed, this scant 335 page work rarely delves beyond walking and completely fails to examine other forms of personal transport such as tottering, strolling, or even waddling. It must therefore suffer in comparison to the exquisite detail in Sarah Bernhardt's "One leg too few: A history of hopping", in which the author painstakingly details and diagrams the kinetics achieved by Anthony Cumia, the only one legged person capable of moseying. It also suffers from a very sparse history of walking and does not cover any of the critical walking related achievements from our rich colonial times. I believe that most readers will be greatly displeased to know that no mention is made of Margaret Brent's trailblazing non-stop saunter from Philadelphia to Boston or the ensuing legal trials that resulted in her convection and lengthy incarceration for inciting civil unrest by "walking in a salacious and wanton manner". While most historical treatises on American women's suffragist movements make no mention of the early campaigners for equal walking rights I certainly expect more from a novel claiming to be a "History of Walking". I know that the casual reader may take offense to such detailed scrutiny but it is a great sense of passion for the subject which guides my critical eye. |
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| "A personal and erudite survey of three centuries of walking" | 2007-03-17 |
| - Reviewed By avatar_o5 |
Solnit's "history of walking" is a surprising excursion in a vast and unsystematised subject area. Indeed, like eating and playing, walking is one of these emblematic human activities that are invested with wildly different cultural meanings. I picked up the book because I am an avid walker and mountaineer and, as I learned, an adherent to the British walking tour ethos. For me there is something fundamentally cleansing, wholesome and right about spending time in the great outdoors. However, this smug romanticism, this adhering to an "established religion for the middle class" is sternly criticised by the author of this book.
For Solnit walking is a quintessentially political activity. And the politics play out at different levels. First, walking is a bulwark against the erosion of the mind by the incessant contemporary rethoric of efficiency and functionality. The walker exposes herself to the accidental, the unexpected, the random and unscreened, and by doing so rebels against the speed and alienation endemic in our postindustrial world. Second, walking is also a reclamation of a physical and public space that is increasingly suburbanised and privatised. Solnit discusses how the early 20th century city was an arena for aesthetic experimentation and political agitation. Walkers and flaneurs, starting with De Quincey in London and Baudelaire in Paris, experimented with an urban underground culture suffused with eroticism and desire. Protest marchers all over the world and throughout the ages have relied on the democratic functions of the street to make their voices heard. Today, the scope for these kinds of trespasses are increasingly rare due to encroaching private property rights and a soulless, panoptic urban architecture. Hence, thus Solnit, we need to revitalise a counterculture to walk in resistance to the post-industrial and post-modern loss of space, time and embodiment. Last and perhaps not least, walking is and will remain the domain of the amateur. It is one of these few areas of human activity where a hierarchy based on expertise makes very little sense. Everyone, barring physical disabilities, is in principle able to be an expert walker.
Beyond the political, there is also a phenomenological dimension to walking which is quite deftly described by Solnit as an "alignment between mind, body and the world". Whoever has spent a couple of days on the trail knows that once the rhythm has been established, one becomes much more alert to minute variations in sensory input (smell, colour, temperatur). Meanwhile, the mind starts to wander much more freely. Solnit writes: "This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it."
Solnit's smart and cogent survey of 3 centuries of walking is appropriately brought into relief by her supple and subtle prose which is a real pleasure to read. Her writing is warmly personal - with a tone that modulates unexpectedly between stridency and vulnerability - as well as erudite. There is none of the pedantic selfconsciousness that spoils the discourse of many academic writers and popularisers alike. After "Wanderlust" I went on to read Solnit's "Field guide to getting lost" which, although not in the same league, confirms her qualities as an engaging personal voice. |
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| "Read this Book, and Go for a Walk" | 2006-06-04 |
| - Reviewed By harold_davis |
Solnit has her flaws. She tends to make a mistake common among critics, that of confounding a powerful metaphor with literal truth. She sometimes over reaches. And I suspect that her research may get some details wrong.
That said, she is intellectually gifted, a good writer, has her heart in the right place, and is always interesting to read.
Read this book, and escape for a while the future that is rushing towards us with an earbud for a phone or Ipod always plugged in. There's great pleasure to be had in a contemplative walk---and in this book. |
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