At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable work offers a lucid, affirmative and wildly well-argued case for hope, even in the dark. Tracing a history of activism and social change over the past five decades, Solnit offers a dazzling account of some of the least expected of those changes and proposes a vision of cause-and-effect relations that provides new grounds for political engagement in the present. Chronicling recent breakthroughs - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico to Seattle in 1999 to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq - she traces the rise of a sophisticated, supple, nonviolent movement of movements. Solnit's book is both accessible and essential reading. With a rhetorical verve not seen since Orwell or Sontag, multi-award winning columnist, author and activist, Rebecca Solnit ponders the progression of social change, drawing from thinkers of the last century - Woolf, Ghandi, Borges, Benjamin, Havel amongst others - to create a manifesto for optimism about the twenty-first century, a tonic for post election-blues..