The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.

While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Audiobook, History, Politics, Environment, Social Justice

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2026

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Angel Shadd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for the arc. Rebecca Solnit offers a vision of hope that is a balm during these political times. The way in which the idea is presented, interconnectedness etc, is uniquely Solnit.

She doesn’t tell us to not be afraid, but in the tapestry she weaves, she gives the reader a chance to take a step back and view the present as a part of the same garment that holds the pasts and upon which the future will be woven.

Interestingly, this volume of hope and social change (including climate activism) actually made me more curious about the natural world. Intentionally or not, this volume has sparked my curiosity about indigenous movements and their impact on our modern thinking.

If you need a light in the dark, The Beginning Comes After the End is a great choice.

[David Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

For reminding us how far we've come, and also have to go.

[Misha]

"There is a way to tell the story of who we were in that fall of 2024 in terms of electoral politics that is, to put it mildly, dismal and discouraging. But deeoer currents of change are at work. This era is not one in which everything is fine and all ancient wrongs have been righted, but it is one in which important parts of a society, maybe a civilization, have changed profoundly, even while the right is trying to change them back. The most profound change is in worldview, when it comes to how settler-colonialists recognize and understand Indigenous presence and rights, and so many other foundational realities about our world, about gender, around race, around injustice and equality, around nature itself and the science that explains it. The practical, tangible changes are consequences of these changed views.

Our world has changed more than almost anyone imagined, in ways both wonderful and terrible, often in ways no one anticipated, and the sheer profundity of change in the past guarantees that this change will continue, that stability is not an option, but participating in directing change might be, if we recognize it.

...

There are many fragments to this mosaic of changes I want to chart, and underlying most of them is a shift toward the idea that everything is connected, that the world is a network of interrelated systems, that the isolated individual is at best a fiction, and that the natural and social realms run more on collaboration and cooperation than competition. It's a shift away from many old hierarchies and segregations and the cruelties they normalized. These ideas of interconnection emerge from many sources, from new economic models and new scientific ideas about biology and psychology, from Buddhist and Indigenous worldviews, from shifting values, from hopes and desires to undo the terrible loneliness and tendency towards isolation and the severing of connections and relationships between people, peoples, and people and nature, that seem entrenched in current social configurations. I believe we're also witnessing a shift from capitalism's tendency to see even the living, even humans, as dead things--as objects and commodities--to Indigenous and animist worldviews that regard being, sentience, and rights as qualities of rivers and mountains, as well as that of plants and animals. Of course, the tricky part of that sentence is the 'we': not everyone is on board and the backlash is ferocious." (4-6)

"The radical uncertainty of the future arises from how we're making the future in the present by how we show up, how new ideas amplify and become realities. But it's the past that shows us the possibilities, how the world has changed, how power can appear in places and among peoples assumed to be powerless and irrelevant, how the most foundational things can be transformed, how ideas and art matter in making the world. As David Graeber reminded us, 'The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.'
The world changed so gradually that many seem not to have noticed it has changed at all. Fredric Jameson is supposed to have said, 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,' and most of the science fiction of my youth seemed to find it easier to imagine intergalactic colonialism than women's equality on earth. But others imagined many kinds of equality and fought to make them a reality." (124)

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am surprised to have not discovered Rebecca Solnit until recently. In her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, Solnit dares to make connections between positive changes happening around the world. She doesn't sugarcoat what's happened and what continues to happen. Instead, she connects the dots globally so we can see a clear path to a better tomorrow—a wonderful book. I listened to Solnit narrate on the audiobook version from hoopla.

[Holly Barker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I find Rebecca Solnit to be one of the most thoughtful progressive writers of our era. In this book, the largest theme in the environment/natural world and not just our interaction with it, but how our societies are reflected in nature. She brings in other topics, from Buddhism to Native Americans, stitching the book with a thread of hope then fully ringing the gong of hope at the end. I appreciate her nuance in a world that often doesn’t seem to want that.

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can be read in an afternoon. I enjoyed some of the metaphors built around the presented ideas. I also liked the connectedness of the essays more than a compilation from disparate sources.

[Mr Brian]

Review of ‘The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change’ by Rebecca Solnit

When Solnit speaks, the world should listen.

Her writing, spanning the years, has echoed with a deep personal voice, rooted in place, as well as optimistic activism. She charts and traces the changes that have transformed society and the world in the past, and reminds us that the power to change the world is within our reach and lies within us all.

This is not a ‘radical’ book- unless the power of ideologies and stories is radical in itself. Solnit has mastered the power of language long ago and the clarity and vision with which we have come to expect from her, resonates once again. Without doubt, this is a powerful vision which she lays out in ‘The Beginning Comes After the End’, one, which if adopted as a blueprint for the 21st century, would create a world and societies that would be worthy of the human race. This ‘blueprint’ would be, ‘A shift towards the idea that everything is connected, that the world is a network of inter-related systems, that the isolated individual is at best a fiction, and that the natural and social realms run more on collaboration and cooperation than competition.’

There are too many of us who are rooted in the last century- whose birth year begins with ‘19__’. We straddle both the past to which we are tethered and anchored, while the 21st century stretches out ahead of us- waiting for us to be the good ancestors for those who follow our footsteps along the path of our species. Solnit reminds us that, ‘We in the 2020s live in a world that would be unbelievable and maybe inconceivable to people sixty or seventy years earlier.’

As I read these words, I think of my father in his last 80s. Born in 1939, on the cusp of the Second World War- an event which defined the 20th century in so many ways- I think that his world and my world are incredibly different and that the changes since the mid-20th century are too numerous to mention. The changes which would have beyond his generation's ken and yet, which we take for granted on a daily basis. Yet, Solnit does not ask us to romanticise the past or to wish to recreate a ‘lost world’, with all its attendant baggage. Indeed, she warns against this. She argues that choosing to allow ourselves to listen to the lessons from the past, can bring us out from beneath the shadows of the past into a new world. ‘But it’s the past that shows us the possibilities, how the world has changed, how power can appear in places and among peoples assumed to be powerless and irrelevant, how the most foundational things can be transformed’

‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’

We all imagine and believe that the future will be different, but perhaps don’t realise that we could be the agents of these changes. As Madonna Thunder Hawk reminds us: “We’re the ancestors of tomorrow.” Solnit herself comments that incremental changes can collectively change the course of history and the future. ‘I’ve lived through a lot of the changes they helped launch, most of them happened so incrementally that they unfolded invisibly, but a thousand steps add up to a considerable distance.’ She urges us to accept what history has shown us- more clearly than anything else- that change is possible. That the ideas cemented into the fabric of our identity and society can be broken and disturbed. ‘Our world has changed more than almost anyone imagined, in ways both wonderful and terrible, often in ways no one anticipated, and the sheer profundity of change in the past guarantees that this change will continue.’

The only constant that is guaranteed is that change happens. ‘Change is a constant, but social change has sped up in our time, altering the very fundamentals of how we think about ourselves and the natural and social worlds, and also who defines what “we” means.’ She identifies the social nudges of change, which have helped us build towards integration and interconnected relationships, rather than a distancing and ‘othering’ ‘Changes build on changes; one shift makes another possible.’

We are not at the end of history, says Solnit- we are simply the navigators in the middle of the journey- the creators of a new story. A story which will shape what the future looks like as we move through the time of this century. A simple task may be for us to try and pierce the mists of time and to imagine what the world could be like by 2100. How would that be accomplished? What, or who, would be the catalysts for this new direction? How many false starts and stumbles would happen along the way? ‘This is a reminder that you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking…’

‘A new heaven and a new earth’

Solnit quotes the words of Antonio Gramsci, when she argues that the birthing of this new changed world is a slow process. ‘The old world is dying. The new one is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise.’ She contends that ideas and stories have power- a power feared by those who wish to cling to the wreckage of the old world, for fear that who they are will be lost. ‘Ideas have power, and while those who support them often dismiss that power, those who fear them recognize they can change the world.’ She also notes the wisdom of Thomas Berry, when she acknowledges that the lack of a certain future path appears to some as though the path does not exist at all. Lack of certainty is not lack of existence.

“We are in trouble because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story- the account of how the world came to be and we fit into it- is not functioning properly and we have not learned the New Story.”

For Solnit, the power of stories can create new ‘forests of possibility’ and it is in this ‘possibility’ where new worlds dare to breathe. What is wonderful is that this imagery continues, as Solnit exhorts us to root ourselves in the past to reach the future.
‘What if our best hope reaches for the future by sinking its roots deep in the past? What futures can we build on these other versions of the past, these other voices with other stories to tell? What beginnings come after such an end?’

A Brave New World

As I look at the sleeping face of my 8-years-old son, I imagine the world of 2100, a time where he will almost be the same age as my father is now. It is a world which I cannot imagine, but one which I know will be different from this one.

I cannot walk with him into that brave new world, but I can hold his hand for as long as possible, to be his guide, until he carries his own dreams of change. I am reminded of the popular motivational poster that once was displayed in his room- ‘Let him sleep, for when he wakes, he will move mountains.’

I know that he will move these mountains, not by scaling the heights in a dangerous, desperate rush, but by slowly moving one stone at a time.

‘The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change’ is the most personal and uplifting book about the power of ideas and about our ability to be transformed.

We are all dreamers.


“We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.”
-Anand Giridharadas

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.

While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Collections often draw from existing bodies of work. Author Solnit began drawing acclaim for her robust, tendentious writing in the early Aughts, and has never fallen out of the cultural conversation. She won't stop telling the truth, though, so her honesty wins her detractors and even enemies across the political spectrum.

One knows a thinker is doing it right when everybody is mad at them for something.

This essay collection breaks no new ground in her public thinking. It is, if I'm honest, a highlight reel with a bit more sameness than I wanted to read. It is also a collection drawn from decades of work. I found myself thinking, "I remember this, move on," and finding it necessary to recall in the moment that it's collected not commissioned to be written anew or afresh. Not every essay chosen was necessarily up to the highest standards in the book. Again, it's a function of a collection...it's not possible to be perfect, but it's possible, like Author Solnit, to be trenchant and to add value to the consideration of organizing theme of this particular project.

Progress is relative. In any consideration of the societal norms prevailing now that has even a modest degree of perspective, things are hugely better for women, queers, trans folk, and people of color. We're always being bombarded with messaging to the contrary, for reasons y'all need to read Paul Linebarger's book to really connect with. A collection of work like this one is a good corrective to the easy-to-internalize message of the world sucks always has always will. It's true; it's also wrong; both these things can and do coexist because, faithless to your entire life's training, almost nothing in the observable universe is a binary. All physical systems are spectrums and there's mounting evidence literally everything is in fact spectrum...look into quantum physics and certainty vanishes to be replaced by probabilities (aka spectra). Author Solnit stressing that each ending is also a beginning is very much in line with this mode of thinking.

It's new enough to most of her audience that repetition is probably a good idea to deploy in examining the topic. Like any new-to-you theory, perspective, or fact, it's going to need some hammering home to become part of one's mental structural supports. I'm ahead of this curve so it wore on my nerve a bit more than it will for others. I hope you'll pick it up and give it a try if you're sinking under the wight of the world's idiocies and evils.

We need the perspective of one who has been decades in the trenches, struggling against the dying order's loud and lousy distractions, to remind us we've come far. We need to keep moving ahead. It's easier to find the will to do that if we've got a stedy hand and an encouraging voice like Author solnit's telling us to remember it can be done.

Because it has been done. It's not finished, this work; it never really is. Now, get back to it!

[Laila · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Beginning Comes After the End is one of those books that quietly but firmly reshapes how you think. Rebecca Solnit builds her argument essay by essay, dismantling the idea that political or social change should be fast, visible, or linear. She repeatedly returns to the point that despair often comes from expecting history to behave neatly, when in reality meaningful change unfolds slowly, unevenly, and often out of sight. By drawing on examples from feminist movements, climate activism, Indigenous resistance, and past political struggles, Solnit shows how victories are frequently recognized only years later, long after the work has been done.

One of the most powerful throughlines is her insistence that uncertainty is not a failure state but the very condition that makes hope possible. Solnit challenges the reader to sit with not knowing outcomes and still act, arguing that certainty belongs to the status quo, not to justice. Her discussions of silenced voices, especially women’s voices, tie personal experience to systemic patterns of erasure and power, reinforcing the idea that telling the truth is itself a form of resistance. The essays do not offer comfort in the form of easy solutions, but they offer something more durable: a framework for staying engaged without guarantees. By the end, the book feels less like a collection of essays and more like a recalibration of how to understand endings, failure, and the long work of change.

Thank you NetGalley for the eARC.

[Corinne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebecca Solnit's essays brought hope, context, and history to the dread and urgency I've felt as I've watched cherished U.S. freedoms and institutions erode over the past year. She makes a thoughtful, coherent case for the interconnectedness of our living world, and how, for many years, we've had worldwide momentum toward acknowledging and re-achieving this interconnectedness. The chaos of this moment in history is more a wild, flailing resistance to the steady progress of a natural order rather than a new, dark, inevitable reality.

One idea that resonated with me is that the current pushback is capitalism/fascism's way of clinging to ideas of entitlement and ownership (and colonialism), fearing more recent movements that are taking us back to integrated inclusive communities depending symbiotically on each other and being more productive long-term as a result.

I especially appreciated her thoughtful history of several civil rights and climate movements. Even thought I was alive for much of what she described, I wasn't always paying attention so was glad to have this primer. I listened to the audio book, narrated by Solnit herself, which was an added bonus. This was so good, I plan to get the print copy and reread.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

A follow-up to Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power if you need a more hopeful perspective about the state of the world and how change occurs. This covers heavy topics but her writing is accessible. I'm just not fully convinced by the book's organization and how biological interconnectedness relates to our current political situation. This was also fully focused on the US and I wouldn't expect it to cover everything in the world, but the US is heavily linked to international issues ex. genocide in Palestine, which was not mentioned at all. The strongest parts of the book were about progress for Native Americans.

There were some interesting ideas in here that made me think and shifted my mindset a bit, and that's what I wanted, so it was still a worthwhile read. Thank you to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for the ARC!

[Rem71090 · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the 2024 election I read “Hope in the Dark” and said that it was the first time I’d felt hopeful since the election. I liked that book and I’ve read a lot of Solnit since as a result. This one came at the right time - it’s easy to give into despair, to think that the game is up and rights are lost. This book reminds the reader that despair isn’t particularly useful, but rather slow work moves the needle of progress forward. The reflection on how far society has come helped to put it in perspective for me. I also think she really nailed the conclusion of her essay (if we take the final chapter as a conclusion, and I do), masterfully weaving in references and quotes from earlier.

That said - there were some places where I think editing could have been better. She drops some examples and refers to David Graeber’s “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years” as “Debt: The First Four Thousand Years.” None of this materially impacted my enjoyment of the book but it did take a star away.

(Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review)

[Maricruz Ramirez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for the ARC.

In The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit does what she does best: she offers grounded reasons for hope without turning away from the realities of injustice. Through a series of essays, she traces social and political change since the 1960s, arguing that meaningful progress has already occurred, and that such progress suggests the possibility of further transformation, regardless of resistance from those invested in the status quo.

What I appreciate most is that Solnit’s hope is not naïve. She acknowledges that marginalized communities continue to face harm and systemic inequities, even amid forward movement. Her writing navigates social justice issues with clarity and accessibility, making complex historical and political shifts understandable for a broad readership.

This is a thoughtful and timely read, especially during moments of political anxiety.

[Sekar Writes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review.

Another exploration of change from Solnit, following No Straight Road Takes You There, and this one is even bigger in scope.

The world moves fast. A lot happens and most of us cannot keep up with all of it. This book is a good way to start paying attention about global issue. Even for those who do follow along, Solnit offers a perspective that is worth to think about. She also touches on the ugly truth: many of us are aware of certain issues but have quietly let some parts of them slip past without really registering them.

So, this book is a reminder that noticing is never too late. That memory has power. That looking back at how much has shifted and actually reflecting on it is its own meaningful act.

Compact but expansive, it helps you see how far things have come and why that distance matters.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quarter into 2026, The Beginning Comes After the End might well be your most important read of the year if you long for positive change during horrific times.

Rebecca Solnit examines the arc of history not through the telephoto lens of the loudest or most violent movements, but through the wide-angle lens of those that have durability. Movements based on empathy and mutual aid are the only ones with the biological fitness to survive. Extractive and exclusionary systems might burn bright and hot, but slow-growth movements prioritizing the collective we remain after the fog clears.

The heart of Solnit’s argument lies in her challenge to our Western obsession with nouns. Westerners treat our lives, our achievements, and our crises as fixed objects. By reframing life as a series of events, she invites us to see ourselves as a verb.

We think of ourselves as objects, stable and defined, but we are actually events, like a storm or a flame, existing only through the continuous movement of energy and time.

Solnit explains that we are not a finished sculpture but a continuous carving. This theme suggests that if nothing is set in stone, then no end is truly final. That is, it's merely a phase-shift in a much longer process.

Lately I have felt like I am standing in the rubble of civilization, but Rebecca Solnit reminds me that I am the flame. Collectively, we are all actors in an unfolding event that no end will extinguish.

Hope is no longer a static feeling I wait for; rather, it's a rhythmic practice. It's a verb I must inhabit to ensure the next beginning is one worth reaching.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this today was the antidote I needed after being pummeled by fractured headlines of war, tariffs, inflation, falling stocks, and the creeping cultural decline into authoritarianism. I found Solnit's strongest writing in the latter chapters. I learned a new word, holobionts, that is, how none of us is a singular identity but a rich arena of microbacteria, fungi, viruses, and other claimants. I learned how important it has been to have Indigenous people reclaim their land and rights because they have their heritage to teach us. I learned how the tapestry of existence is required for successful progeny and not the combatant, 'survival of the fittest' (that defunct misinterpretation of natural selection). I learned how to have genuine hope in the midst of these times. Who wouldn't want to read a book like this?

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "The Beginning Comes After the End", Rebecca Solnit has gifted us with an antidote for the bleakness of our times, through the precious qualities of hope, optimism, and perspective. In this essay collection, Solnit reflects on the nature of change, highlighting its invisible and incremental qualities, and drawing attention to our achievements and the means by which they were made. There is a strong focus on environmental and social activism, with on an incredible collection of experiences and interests on display. This book will refresh your spirit and renew your commitment to the call to action for social change. This has been the collection of Solnit's essays that I have enjoyed the most - it is accessible and hopeful, a thought-provoking read without being dense and intimidating. Highly recommend!
Thank you to NetGalley for the eARC.

[Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much like, "Hope in the Dark," this collection of meditations on change gave me perspective on the current dumpster fire that is our sociopolitical reality. Over and over, Solnit draws on recent history (60ish years) to highlight the reality that the only thing constant is change. The world today may not be much different than last year, but it is nothing like the year 1960. We live in a world our ancestors couldn't imagine. And the new world will not be one we can currently comprehend.

Written for people panicked about the current state of affairs, Solnit confirms that the old world IS beginning to crumble, BUT that the end is just the beginning of a new world struggling to be born. Our power lies in deciding which way and how we will influence the shift.

I listened to the audiobook, and it's fairly short, so I actually listened to it twice in a row. So much relevant history considered together in this particular context did serve to widen the lens and reduce my panic.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always love her books but I never know how to review them, I would say that the best way to describe them is that they’re food for thought, she actually says it really well in this book

“Like everything I write, it’s not meant to be comprehensive—rather, think of it as a map on which you can fill in missing details and trace your own routes against mine or clarify your vision by disagreeing with mine.”

This book is very optimistic which I feel most of us need right now, it’s not naive though. It’s just a good reminder that things move, things change, and that our memories can also be the worst when it comes to things of the past. It’s a good reminder that things do change, sometimes for bad, sometimes for good, but it’s always moving. And there are things we can be happy about.

[Delegra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book by Rebecca Solnit that I've read, so for me it was fresh and inspiring. Other reviewers felt it was sort of a rehash or repeat of what she has said in her other books. I had the opportunity to go to a book signing, and it was inspiring to hear her in person. She truly lives her message.

Yes the bulk of her emphasis is on the changes brought about by the long time struggles of Indigenous peoples, but she weaves in the fact that the dramatic transformations for women, Blacks, Latinos, LGBTQ, and people with disabilities are related. They are all changes away from "business as usual" by the "white men" at the top.

I agree with the other reviewer who said, "If you need a light in the dark, The Beginning Comes After the End is a great choice."

[Barb Chamberlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This came at a good time for me. Avoiding the news, then doomscrolling through it. Repeatedly horrified, but feeling there was little I could do. Sometimes I’d get a thought of being glad I wasn’t younger—so I’d have less of this to live through. This offered a different take on what’s happening. Taking a deep breath and thinking about the long view. I’ve understood that people are frightened by change—letting go of what they believed, or felt was right. Change is scary, better the devil you know!
Make America great again—just when was it great—an unrealistic idea of what the past was.
This was a 4, perhaps a bit more, because sometimes it seemed the author was fitting things into odd places; I didn’t get all her connections—but her ideas and hopeful ideas are a balm!

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read most of Rebecca Solnit's essay collections and have enjoyed her perspective on personal and social issues. This book feels less organized around a specific thesis about change and instead features reflections on positive changes during her lifetime. I would have enjoyed more interconnectedness between the chapters or possibly a more chronological exploration of progress.

Solnit's writing is engaging, and she has a skill for finding and prioritizing hope in her framing of what's been accomplished and what work still needs to be done.

Thank you to NetGalley and Haymarket Books for the ARC!

[B. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received an ARC from the publisher. I've read almost everything Solnit has written and loved most of it. This one is definitely the exception to that. It's very fluffy and almost fangirlish compared to her previous books. It honestly feels like it was written by a different person. And yes blah, blah blah of course different person, time changes us all and these last few years have been shittier than most, but the writing tone and style feels completely changed and this one just didn't give me any feeling of connection to her writing.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always enjoy Rebecca Solnit’s take on things and look forward to these collections of essays that seem to come out fairly regularly.

This one is optimistic, reminding us that the current regressive backlash is actually a reaction to the success of positive trends, and the future may not be as bleak as it appears at the moment. Perhaps this is just the death throes of one world before the birth of another, hopefully, improved world. We have a long, hard journey to a more just and sustainable world, but it might yet happen.

This was timely medicine.

[Miranda Summerset · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 STARS! Never read anything by this author, but I was blessed with an arc copy & am very grateful to be able to experience her smarts for a while. This book is science & biology versus current politics. It deals with how the past influences the future & nature versus nurture. I loved it & learned a lot & liked the wide variety of issues addressed. It does make you think & view things differently, maybe if you feel hopeless about the current state of America/the world. The title is perfect!

[Whisper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t really see the point of this book. It seems like copium to deal with the right wing fascist wave we’re living through. It didn’t seem to have a solid thesis or point— just some disjointed stories about how life and culture have changed and become more connected. I enjoyed it for what it was it was just pointless.

Also sadly the authors narrator voice was far too breathy for my tastes. It never felt like she finished a sentence because her voice stayed in the range the whole book.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisite writing as ever, thoughtful, challenging, important work. As always I enjoy the intellectual challenge of the author’s works. She challenges you to think hard about the world and your contribution in it. Highly recommended. Thanks to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounded up from 3.5 stars.

Felt similar to Braiding Sweetgrass and Serviceberry, but more of a series of essays that encourage long term perspectives and broad view of integration. Reasons to be optimistic nestled into reasons to continue to persist.

[Dipali · Rating 4 out of 5]

** A copy of The Beginning Comes After The End was provided by the publisher and NetGalley/Edelweiss+ in exchange for an honest review **

I will read anything by Rebecca Solnit. As I say time and time again, I want to be her when I grow up. Another great addition to the Solnit canon.

[Beverly Naidus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book that is so needed for this time

Rebecca does it again. Like Hope in the Dark and A Paradise in Hell, this book is the encouraging tonic that we need to believe in our power.