Rebecca Solnit - Our Man in Boston

Rare Medium • A Thoughtful View

Last week I had a pleasant and stimulating conversation with Nick Flynn whose new book made mention of and was influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. That same day the very valuable web site Tomdistpatch.com published an eloquent and astute view of the current Haiti catastrophe by Solnit. Among the things that troubled her were the media coverage and the employment of the word “looting”:

And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

Rebecca Solnit is an original’s original whose writings are well worth becoming acquainted, and I urge you to read this essay in its entirety. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 26, 2010

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Bookbag • The New Morality

Having recently noted Rebecca Solnit’s encouraging study of community responses to disasters (like Hurricane Katrina), I also availed myself of an opportunity to chat with Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains), whose new book, Strength in What Remains (Random House), vividly and honestly chronicles the truly extraordinary ordeal of Deogratias, a medical student who escapes the horrors of his homeland of Burundi and lands in New York City with $200, knowing no English and knowing no one.

Through the kindness of an assortment of strangers, he leaves his sleeping place in Central Park and matriculates at Columbia University and then Harvard’s School of Public Health and becomes a United States citizen. And founds Village Health Works, an organization based on the principles he learned at Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health.

Given a prevailing miasma of cynicism, stories like Deo’s—and indeed the considerable aid directed to Farmer’s efforts—are a glimmer of rebuttal to the notion that people are rotten and selfish and, as Thomas Hobbes intoned, that the normal state of nature was “the war of all against all,” thus leading to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Book Cover

In On Kindness (FSG), psychiatrist Adam Phillips (Side Effects) and historian Barbara Taylor (Eve and the New Jerusalem) argue that kindness has become imperiled: “This is a historical story—about how and why people have been talked out of their kindness—but also a psychological one, a story about how vulnerability becomes traumatic to people.”

Quoting On the Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche, who “regarded the inexorable progress of the morality of compassion which afflicted even the philosophers with its illness, as the most sinister symptom of the most sinister development of our European culture,” the authors of this slender tome assert that the morality of compassion has not made progress, and has indeed shied away from its shrewdest insights—and that this is the truly sinister symptom of modern life. Amen. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 6, 2009

» Read an excerpt from Strength in What Remains.

1 Comment • Tweet this • Post to Facebook • FILE UNDER: Adam Phillips, Barbara Taylor, Bookbag, Hurricane Katrina, New York City, Partners in Health, Philosophy, Rebecca Solnit, Tracy Kidder, Village Health Works

Current Reads • Monument

Looking at Rebecca Solnit’s body of published work—Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art—makes obvious her penchant for observation from oblique and tangential angles (her only obvious aspect). With her new opus, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking), Lannan Literary Prize-winner Solnit takes on the aftermaths of disasters—including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Sept. 11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans—and the communities that arise in response. Among other problems she cites is the misinformation frequently ladled out by first-responding media. Contrary to expectations, people respond altruistically, and Solnit notes, “The real question is not why this brief paradise of mutual aid and altruism appears but rather why it is ordinarily overwhelmed by another world order.” Or to put it simply, panic seems to come from the top. For example, the misleading reports of lawlessness in New Orleans disregarded and discouraged the far more common acts of altruism. Pointedly, Solnit asserts that “no evidence exists that anyone was shot or killed by the supposed gangs.” This is an eye-opening investigation by an original and diligent thinker: a kind of feel-good book for smart people. And we probably don’t have enough of those.

Her recent essay on Sept. 11 at Tom’s Dispatch concludes:

The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument, the living who coexist in peace in ordinary times and who save one another in extraordinary times. Civil society triumphed that morning in full glory. Look at it: remember that this is who we were and can be.

—Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 21, 2009

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Reading • The World According to TomDispatch

If you have not been introduced to TomDispatch, the useful and informative web site edited by Tom Engelhardt, this anthology is a good opportunity to become acquainted. Among the many commentators in this book are Chalmers Johnson, Juan Cole, Rebecca Solnit, Mark Danner, Ruth Rosen, Jonathan Schell, Greg Grandin, Noam Chomsky, Karen J. Greenberg, and the list goes on and on. Howard Zinn points out:

TomDispatch is one of the wonders of the electronic age. A touch of the finger and you get the juiciest, meatiest information and analysis, so rich a feast of intelligence and insight I often felt short of breath. Now, Tom Engelhardt has assembled some of the best of his dispatches, from some of the boldest and most astute commentators in the country. So take a deep breath and read.

—Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 7, 2008

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About Our Man in Boston

When Robert Birnbaum was an adolescent, his mother took him to the Chicago Public Library every week, and he would leave with armloads of books. Ever since he has been an avid reader—except in the cultural sinkhole era of the ’70s (think Saturday Night Fever).

Illustration by Witold Ridel

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Tuesday, March 16, 2010