Wanderlust:history of Walking

What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories--of anatomical evolution & city design, of treadmills & labyrinths, of walking clubs & sexual mores--to create a portrait of the range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure & for political, aesthetic, & social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday & extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers. The first general history of walking, Solnit's book finds a profound relationship between walking & thinking, walking & culture, & argues for the necessity of preserving the time & space in which to walk in an ever-more automobile-dependent & accelerated world. With delightful profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history & fiction--from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja--Wanderlust offers a provocative examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, & the world around the walker.Solnit, Rebecca is the author of 'Wanderlust:history of Walking' with ISBN 9780670882090 and ISBN 0670882097.