Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

I. The Pace of Thoughts
1. Tracing a Headland: An Introduction
3. The Mind at Three Miles an Hour
3. Rising and Falling: The Theorists of Bipedalism
4. The Uphill Road to Grace: Some Pilgrimages
5. Labyrinths and Cadillacs: Walking into the Realm of the Symbolic
II. From the Garden to the Wild
6. The Path Out of the Garden
7. The Legs of William Wordsworth
8. A Thousand Miles of Conventional Sentiment: The Literature of Walking
9. Mount Obscurity and Mount Arrival
10. Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars

III. Lives of the Streets
11. The Solitary Stroller and the City
12. Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt
13. Citizens of the Streets: Parties, Processions, and Revolutions
14. Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Space

IV. Past the End of the Road
15. Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche
16. The Shape of a Walk
17. Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two Points

Notes
Index
Sources for Foot Quotations

About the Author

Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award.

Reviews

Praise for Wanderlust:

“Solnit is an elegant essayist . . . [she] joyfully trespasses across disciplines and genres, tracing a path through philosophy, paleontology, politics, religion, and literary criticism.”
—The New York Times

“A tour de force . . . Solnit's is a sinuous course propelled by abandon yet guided by a firm intelligence . . . she has a fine sense of paradoz that keeps her from prosletyzing . . . a writer of unflagging grace, has a remarkable ability to wrest meaning from the mundane.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“[Solnit is] a rigorous polymath capable of stunning flashes of original thought . . . fascinating.”
—Los Angeles Weekly

“[Solnit's] words remind us of walking's simple joy and return us to a time when an aimless contemplative stroll was a daily activity, not a guilty pleasure.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Solnit's thoughtful, thought-provoking, and delightful exploration of the seemingly mndane topic of walking offers an abundance of new ways to think . . . An entertaining and utterly compelling read, filled with facts and observations, written with elegance and eloquence.”
—San Francisco Bay Guardian

“Idiosyncratic and inspiring . . . Wanderlust is an anecdotal On the Road, a rambling woman's paean to the mind-body connection.”
—Voice Literary Supplement

“An erudite history of walking studded with arresting insights.”
—Elle

“Rich with brilliant observaiton and detail . . . full of beautiful aphorisms and leaps of imagination, a scholarship of evocation rather than definition.”
—Salon

Walking, as Thoreau said and Solnit elegantly demonstrates, inevitably leads to other subjects. This pleasing and enlightening history of pedestrianism unfolds like a walking conversation with a particularly well-informed companion with wide-ranging interests. Walking, says Solnit (Savage Dreams; A Book of Migrations), is the state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned; thus she begins with the long historical association between walking and philosophizing. She briefly looks at the fossil evidence of human evolution, pointing to the ability to move upright on two legs as the very characteristic that separated humans from the other beasts and has allowed us to dominate them. She looks at pilgrims, poets, streetwalkers and demonstrators, and ends up, surprisingly, in Las Vegas--or maybe not so surprisingly in that city of tourists, since "Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking." Inevitably, as these words suggest, Solnit's focus isn't pedestrianism's past but its prognosis--the way in which the culture of walking has evolved out of the disembodiment of everyday life resulting from "automobilization and suburbanization." Familiar as that message sounds, Solnit delivers it without the usual ecological and ideological pieties. Her book captures, in the ease and cadences of its prose, the rhythms of a good walk. The relationship between walking and thought and its expression in words is the underlying theme to which she repeatedly returns. "Language is like a road," she writes; "it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read." Agent: Bonnie Nadell. 4-city author tour. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Praise for Wanderlust:

"Solnit is an elegant essayist . . . [she] joyfully trespasses across disciplines and genres, tracing a path through philosophy, paleontology, politics, religion, and literary criticism."
-The New York Times

"A tour de force . . . Solnit's is a sinuous course propelled by abandon yet guided by a firm intelligence . . . she has a fine sense of paradoz that keeps her from prosletyzing . . . a writer of unflagging grace, has a remarkable ability to wrest meaning from the mundane."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"[Solnit is] a rigorous polymath capable of stunning flashes of original thought . . . fascinating."
-Los Angeles Weekly

"[Solnit's] words remind us of walking's simple joy and return us to a time when an aimless contemplative stroll was a daily activity, not a guilty pleasure."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Solnit's thoughtful, thought-provoking, and delightful exploration of the seemingly mndane topic of walking offers an abundance of new ways to think . . . An entertaining and utterly compelling read, filled with facts and observations, written with elegance and eloquence."
-San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Idiosyncratic and inspiring . . . Wanderlust is an anecdotal On the Road, a rambling woman's paean to the mind-body connection."
-Voice Literary Supplement

"An erudite history of walking studded with arresting insights."
-Elle

"Rich with brilliant observaiton and detail . . . full of beautiful aphorisms and leaps of imagination, a scholarship of evocation rather than definition."
-Salon