Awards

• Winner of Commonwealth Club of California Book Award.
• Winner of Lukas Prize Project (Lynton History Prize) 2004
• Winner of Mark Lynton History Prize.
• Winner of National Book Critics Circle Awards.
• Winner of Spur Awards.

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology “A panoramic vision of cultural change” —The New York Times Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell's Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

Full Product Details

9780142004104

Table of Contents

Reviews

One finds it hard to remember what things looked like before this book appeared in the world. --The New York Times Book Review The imagery of a poet, the ideas of a theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive. --San Francisco Chronicle

Praise for River of Shadows: “Never less than deeply intelligent, and often very close to inspired. It belongs to that wondrous class of books—like William Gass’s On Being Blue and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet—in which an extraordinary mind seizes hold of an unexpected topic and renders it with such confidence, subtlety and grace  that one finds it hard to remember what things looked like before the book appeared in the world.” —The New York Times Book Review “Rich and rewarding . . . [Solnit] has rescued a strange, inexplicable fellow from mere histories of photography . . . a book of enormous intelligence and fascination.” —The New Republic “Solnit has the wide-foraging mind of a great essayist and the West-besotted soul of the recording secretary for your local historical society . . . she's who Susan Sontag might have become if Sontag had never forsaken California for Manhattan . . . Solnit’s prose combines in individual paragraphs the imagery of a poet, the ideas of the theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive . . . [River of Shadows] is a book whose cantering intelligence keeps it, from first to last, airborne.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A perfect example of a subject waiting—in this case for almost a century and a half—for the appropriate writer to come along to unlock its concealed meaning and unexpected relevance . . . This portrait of a man, a place, a time, a technology, an art and various other matters that elude encapsulation shines on nearly every page with rigor and gusto and is consistently a delight to read.” —The Los Angeles Times “Extraordinary . . . it is hard to do justice to Solnit's far-reaching perspective . . . Her prose, terse and poetic, makes the book a pleasurably dizzying page-turner.” —Bookforum “Solnit is a cultural historian in the desert-mystic mode, trailing ideas like swarms of butterflies.” —Harper's Magazine

The imagery of a poet, the ideas of a theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive. aOne finds it hard to remember what things looked like before this book appeared in the world.a ( The New York Times Book Review ) aThe imagery of a poet, the ideas of a theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive.a ( San Francisco Chronicle ) ?One finds it hard to remember what things looked like before this book appeared in the world.? ( The New York Times Book Review ) The imagery of a poet, the ideas of a theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive.? ( San Francisco Chronicle ) One finds it hard to remember what things looked like before this book appeared in the world. --The New York Times Book Review The imagery of a poet, the ideas of a theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive. --San Francisco Chronicle One finds it hard to remember what things looked like before this book appeared in the world. The New York Times Book Review The imagery of a poet, the ideas of a theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive. San Francisco Chronicle

Author Information

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.

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