1994
First Published
4.22
Average Rating
435
Number of Pages
In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants that has yet to come to a real conclusion. A century later—1951—and about a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U. S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, in what was called a nuclear testing program but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. Savage Dreams is an exploration of these two landscapes. Together they serve as our national Eden and Armageddon and offer up a lot of the history of the west, not only in terms of Indian and environmental wars, but in terms of the relationship between culture—the generation of beliefs and views—and its implementation as politics.
Avg Rating
4.22
Number of Ratings
541
5 STARS
44%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
13%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
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Author
Rebecca Solnit
Author · 32 books
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.
