Rebecca Solnit, “A Paradise Built in Hell” – Feb. 21
Whitley Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.
Surveying five events from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, Solnit examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities. Solnit found the altruism after each of these occurrences was consistent, resulting in much different accounts than those propelled by local and federal government reports and commercial media.
Solnit is the author of 13 books about art, landscape, public and collective life, ecology, politics, hope, meandering, reverie, and memory. They include November 2010’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, a book of 22 maps and nearly 30 collaborators; last year’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and many others, including the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). She has worked with climate change, Native American land rights, antinuclear, human rights, antiwar and other issues as an activist and journalist. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper’s and frequent contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com and has made her living as an independent writer since 1988.