Our featured book for May, 2024, is Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit.
Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of radicals at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them–and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. (from the publisher)
Although the book was originally published in 2004 and some of her specific historical examples are now dated, Solnit’s powerful arguments still resonate twenty years later.
Northwestern’s library has the 2005 edition. You can find the 2016 edition at Chicago Public Library.
Northwestern Law Library Blog 