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

In this ardent yet repetitive essay collection, author and activist Solnit (No Straight Road Takes You There) argues that social progress, while not always immediate or linear, is still occurring. Explaining that change is “invisible” over longer stretches of time, once the “baseline” has been forgotten, the author recaps the significant social advancements of the past several decades, including civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ+ equality, and the environmental movement. Along the way, she highlights the profound evolutions taking place within each issue. The fight for Indigenous rights and recognition, for example, has in recent years seen major strides forward, with federal lands being restored to tribal ownership and rapidly spreading public awareness that depicting Native Americans as “vanished, faded away, extinct” is offensive. The author’s optimism doesn’t cloud her ability to see the severity of today’s ongoing far-right backlash, but she does reinterpret it as a violent trashing of a dying old world that will lead to the birth of a new one—a world with a greater understanding of the “interconnection” between people, animals, and nature. While it’s a powerful idea, the author’s continual reworking of the phrase “beginnings are what come after endings” and constant reassertion that change will emerge “so subtly, so slowly” can come off like she’s trying to convince herself as much as readers. The result is a well-intentioned but faulty antidote against fatalism. (Mar.)