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67
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
69/100Critics
44/100Scholars
88/100Author:
Rebecca Solnit
Publisher:
Viking
Date:
October 19, 2021
An exploration of roses, pleasure, and politics: a look at George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.
What The Reviewers Say
... on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected.
Essayist that she is, Rebecca Solnit pursues her subjects down multiple pathways of thought, feeling, memory and experience, aided by historical research and the intuitive literary hunch, as needed. Like George Orwell as essayist, the subject of her latest book and her model, she deploys the full human instrument in service of her curiosity.
George Orwell too was known to roam, which might be one reason why Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses, is, from its beautiful cover to its impassioned coda, one of her very best. This multifaceted tribute to one of her principal literary influences is a reassessment of a writer best known for his fervent criticism of totalitarianism as 'threat not just to liberty and human rights but to language and consciousness'.
... a deeply political collection of interlinked essays, and at its center are the tensions between beauty and labor, joy and suffering.
