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Wanderlust: A History of Walking | 
 enlarge | Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 44678
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 0140286012
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.5109
EAN: 9780140286014
ASIN: 0140286012
Publication Date: June 1, 2001
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Condition: Standard used condition.
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Amazon.com Review
The ability to walk on two legs over long distances distinguishes Homo sapiens from other primates, and indeed from every other species on earth. That ability has also yielded some of the best creative work of our species: the lyrical ballads of the English romantic poets, composed on long walks over hill and dale; the speculations of the peripatetic philosophers; the meditations of footloose Chinese and Japanese poets; the exhortations of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Rebecca Solnit, a thoughtful writer and spirited walker, takes her readers on a leisurely journey through the prehistory, history, and natural history of bipedal motion. Walking, she observes, affords its practitioners an immediate reward--the ability to observe the world at a relaxed gait, one that allows us to take in sights, sounds, and smells that we might otherwise pass by. It provides a vehicle for much-needed solitude and private thought. For the health-minded, walking affords a low-impact and usually pleasant way of shedding a few pounds and stretching a few muscles. It is an essential part of the human adventure--and one that has, until now, been too little documented. Written in a time when landscapes and cities alike are designed to accommodate automobiles and not pedestrians, Solnit's extraordinary book is an enticement to lace up shoes and set out on an aimless, meditative stroll of one's own. --Gregory McNamee
Product Description
Drawing together many histories-of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores-Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction-from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja-finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 wonderful perspective April 5, 2008
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.
 A Walk to Forget December 5, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
A personal and erudite survey of three centuries of walking March 17, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
Read this Book, and Go for a Walk June 4, 2006
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
An excursion into fascinating territory January 1, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
In "Wanderlust" Rebecca Solnit weaves together myriad facets of the human experience to chronicle the role of walking. As can be expected, this is a complex topic, covering not only the details of geographic locale but the sociological and historical context of the subject as well. In this book, Solnit uses walking as both central theme and backdrop, using the topic as a stepping stone to meander onto her ruminations on diverse topics. Her discursions are thought provoking, enlightening and diverse. It is almost as if the author invites you to join her on a walk, sharing with you her insights on human condition. If not for the place, time and gender to which she is born, Solnit comes across as a "Peripatetic" - a wandering philosopher. At the end of the book, one has the feeling of coming home from an excursion wiser and more thoughtful.
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