Orwell’s Roses

Description

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

“An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood

“A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire Messud, Harper’s

“Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way.” —Vogue

A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world

“In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So be-gins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.

Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.

Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit’s portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.NAMED A “MUST-READ” BOOK OF 2021 BY TIME

“I loved this book, and so will many. . . [Orwell] is re-envisioned as a joyous, hopeful, life-loving, toad-appreciating, baby-cherishing dad, but especially as an avid and energetic gardener . . . an exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.”
—Margaret Atwood

“[A] tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation . . . the great pleasure of reading [Solnit] is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections . . . a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker . . . movingly, [Solnit]  takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his pollical novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things.”
—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

“[A] wide-ranging yet disciplined sequence of essays on the importance of joy in Orwell’s concept of freedom . . . Solnit seeks to show us that Orwell was […] capable of taking great joy in small things . . . and such pleasure was intrinsic to his political vision . . . like Orwell as essayist, Solnit  deploys the full human instrument in service of her curiosity . . . She just creates a frame large enough to contain both revolutionary brilliance and unwitting reactionary associations in the same person—large enough to contain life’s contradictions in a way that only the essay, that humble literary mouthpiece, can.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] far-reaching meditation on Orwell’s life and on the cultural significance of roses . . . Most affecting is the surprising hopefulness implicit in a political writer’s passion for nature: ‘Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in moments of delight, even rapture.’”
—The New Yorker

“Expansive and thought-provoking . . . in the hands of a skilled novelist or essayist like Solnit […] a biography becomes something else entirely. It begins in the middle. It skips the boring bits. It possesses a voice, and a point of view. It is unapologetically incomplete, and trusts the readers to go elsewhere to find out whatever else they might like to know . . . Orwell’s Roses takes its place alongside other great non-biography biographies written by acclaimed authors who know how to tell a good story.”
—The Washington Post 

“[A] maverick meditation on Orwell’s legacy . . . an exploration of what it means to plant a rose, what roses mean in general, and what Orwell means to Solnit . . . [they] share vital common ground. His ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’ has been central to Solnit’s project from the start.”
—The New York Review of Books

“Widely read in Orwell’s work and never afraid to ask awkward questions of him, Ms. Solnit seems especially exercised by the apparent contradiction between a progressive political standpoint and the pursuit of personal pleasure.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“One of the pleasures of reading Orwell’s Roses is its unexpected turns from one subject to the next . . . Solnit is having fun when she makes these connections—finding joy in the intellectual pursuit of writing and thinking. That she allows herself to do so in a book that is in many ways very serious too is in keeping with the very aesthetics it’s engaging with. ‘Clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness are aesthetic values to him, and pleasures,’ she writes about Orwell. But she may as well have been describing her own, or at least this book’s, aesthetic values and pleasures as well.”
—NPR

“[L]uminous . . . an ode to trees, gardens, and especially roses—all of which Orwell cultivated with a passion—and a contemplation of authoritarianism, resistance, pleasure, and the natural world.”
—O Quarterly

“[A] brand-new piece of nonfiction from celebrated author and journalist Rebecca Solnit that reconsiders George Orwell’s legacy once and for all . . . [she] examines Orwell’s lifelong fascination with gardening from all possible directions . . . The task that Solnit has set for herself in this book is mighty, but she’s more than up to it as a writer and a thinker; nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way.”
—Vogue

“Orwell’s Roses is, from its beautiful cover to its impassioned coda, one of [Solnit’s] very best . . . [A] multifaceted tribute . . . at once a biographical study of this champion of freedom, an impressive work of cultural and literary criticism and a testament to Solnit’s far-ranging curiosity . . . [She] leaves no row unhoed as she simultaneously explores the roots of Orwell’s prolific literary output and the fecund history of roses . . . [A] triumph, a delight of digressions.”
—Los Angeles Times 

“George Orwell’s books have been read by millions and hailed as essential texts for combating autocracy. It’s not easy to find new angles on such a prominent figure, but Rebecca Solnit has done just that. That she succeeds in impressive fashion will surprise no one who’s familiar with the work of the polymathic San Franciscan…Readers who appreciate beauty or wisdom — anyone who enjoys books, basically — will find plenty to like in these pages…Though Orwell’s every word had been scrutinized by the time Solnit began this project, her stellar book shows us that an original thinker can make any subject fresh.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“One does not immediately associate author George Orwell with horticulture, but we’re not all as insightful and perceptive as Rebecca Solnit . . . Although the elegance and urgency of her prose counts for much of the pleasure of Orwell’s Roses, it is the way in which Solnit connects disparate elements of her subjects that distinguishes the book . . . With precise control and boundless curiosity, Solnit has produced a work of biography and nature writing that makes readers see the enduring and the ephemeral in entirely new ways, free from cliché and obfuscation.”
—Sierra Magazine

“Rebecca Solnit, never one to be predictable, returns with Orwell’s Roses, which draws together the great British essayist’s lesser-known savoring of nature with his legacy of antiauthoritarianism . . . An engrossing appreciation of how beauty requires ugliness.”
—Chicago Tribune

“The best writer about realistic hope, it seems to me, at the moment, is Rebecca Solnit . . . [Orwell’s Roses is] a beautiful, beautiful book.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Falter

“Uncommonly wonderful . . . Like any Rebecca Solnit book, this too is a landmass of layered aboutness beneath the surface story—a book stratified with art and politics, beauty and ecology, mortality and what gives our lives meaning.”
—The Marginalian 

“[Solnit is] the most compelling living writer on ecology, place and hope. Her work draws attention—both hers and the reader’s—away from the relentlessness of technology and its attendant busyness, and towards the rhythms of human and nonhuman interactions and lives . . . Solnit’s newest book [is a] balm.”
—Electric Literature 

“A reflection on what gardening may have meant to Orwell, but also what it means to gardeners everywhere; beauty for today, hope for tomorrow, and a desire to create something for those that come after – all of which finds an echo in the best of politics . . . Solnit restores something often missing not only from Orwell but from the political tradition of which he is part.”
—Observer (London) 

“[A] charmingly fresh biography.” 
—USA Today

“Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Orwell’s Roses, is less a biography of the great novelist’s political theories and journalistic peregrinations than a pure celebration of the rich natural world found within Orwell’s writing . . . In the spare, elegant prose we’ve learned to expect from Solnit, she details the myriad ways Orwell managed to find beauty in even the ugliest of places. Likewise, she pushes readers to treasure the small moments of grace to be found in the natural world, even now, in the face of climate catastrophes and global unrest.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books 

“Elegant . . . muses on Orwell with all Rebecca Solnit’s luminous intelligence and trademark optimism. If ‘Orwellian’ has become synonymous with darkness and oppression, she opens up his life affirming love of gardening, of wild nature and life’s physical pleasure, his antidote to the grim puritanism of ideologues”
—Polly Toynbee

“Part biography, part memoir, a historical and cultural analysis and a work of literary criticism, Solnit’s book is a love letter in prose to those roses, to Orwell and to the enduring relevance of his ethical sensibility. It is efflorescent, a study that seeds  and blooms, propagates thoughts, and tends to historical associations.”
—New Statesman 

“[Solnit] has a knack for making surprising and poignant connections between seemingly disparate things . . . [Orwell’s Roses is] another expansive look at politics, power, beauty, and the stories we tell ourselves.”
—LitHub

“Just when you think are you sick of hearing about George Orwell, Solnit reveals a surprising side. Orwell was a passionate gardener, and especially enjoyed flowers. Solnit uses fresh insight to illuminate an absorbing meditation on Orwell’s work as a writer and antifascist.”
—The Millions

“There’s no way to predict whether history someday will accord Rebecca Solnit’s work the same respect George Orwell’s has earned. Regardless, readers of the early 21st century should be grateful for her clear-eyed, articulate presence in our midst.”
—Shelf Awareness

“[An] avidly researched, richly elucidating book of biographical revelations and evocative discoveries . . . Orwell will always be relied on for his astute understanding of the threat of totalitarianism and its malignant lies; Solnit also ensures that we’ll value Orwell’s profound understanding of how love, pleasure, and awe for nature can be powerful forms of resistance.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“[A] brilliant survey . . . Fans of Marta MacDowell’s biographies of gardening writers will appreciate this lyrical exploration.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A kaleidoscopic view of a man we thought we knew, by a woman who keeps surprising us with her dazzling mind.  Solnit has written an exquisitely layered book soaring in its reach, subversive in its scope, and joyous in its pleasure to read.  Her exploration into how and why cultivating beauty matters, alongside fighting injustices as Orwell’s garden supported his fierce critique of fascism, reminds us of the singular fact: life is both flower and thorn. This profound and graceful book not only redefines what is ‘Orwellian,’ it reimagines how we might live a life of greater intention by opening our hearts to what is beautiful, brave, and of Earth.”
—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion

“Solnit shows that Orwell’s politics were grounded in a vision of the good life that he conducted with gusto through some of the worst decades of the twentieth century.  This was partly his nature and partly his political project; along with his famous lessons about the misuse of political language and power, he wanted people to understand that the life of a democratic socialist could and should include joy, as an already existing example of what might happen if we made a better world.  A beautiful and important book.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future
 
“What a book! It is a privilege for the rest of us to listen in as our finest contemporary essayist engages in deep conversation across time with perhaps the greatest essayist in the history of the language. This volume is humane, challenging–and a reminder that we all must, and can, make a life on this beautiful planet, even as we work to improve it.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Falter:  Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

“There is nothing more political than a garden, and Rebecca Solnit brings Orwell’s life and writing vividly alive through his quiet determination to love the surface of the earth. Orwell’s Roses shows how intimately aesthetics is intertwined with ethics, and in doing so, Solnit has given us a truly beautiful book.”
—Alex Christofi, author of Dostoevsky in Love

“We all know what Orwell hated, but Solnit pays attention to what he loved. Orwell’s Roses is an ingeniously fresh and unpredictable take on his life and times, and the values he held dear.”
—Dorian Lynskey, author of The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984

“This book unfolds like the petals of a rose—the political rose, the personal rose—and enacts its subject in the ethics of its beauty and the grace of its resistance.” 
—Jay Griffiths, author of Why Rebel

“This book is brilliant because it is true, and because it rescues Orwell from a kind of dourness and seriousness, and gives him back his humanity and yes, his Englishness.” 
—James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral

“This is an enchanting book, as powerful in its arguments as it is enjoyable to read. From a surprising close-up of George Orwell planting three Woolworth roses, Solnit pans to a bracing new vista of the man and his fierce political aesthetic, taking in the injustices of the rose industry and lying Soviet science as she goes. Brilliant.”
—Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad, and SadRebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Recollections of My Nonexistence, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.One

Day of the Dead

In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. I had known this formore than three decades and never thought enough about whatthat meant until a November day a few years ago, when I was underdoctor’s orders to recuperate at home in San Francisco and was alsoon a train from London to Cambridge to talk with another writerabout a book I’d written. It was November 2, and where I’m fromthat’s celebrated as Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Backhome, my neighbors had built altars to those who had died in the pastyear, decorated with candles, food, marigolds, photographs of andletters to those they’d lost, and in the evening people were going topromenade and fill the streets to pay their respects at the open-airaltars and eat pan de muerto, bread of the dead, some of their facespainted to look like skulls adorned with flowers in that Mexican traditionthat finds life in death and death in life. In a lot of Catholicplaces, it’s a day to visit cemeteries, clean family graves, and adornthem with flowers. Like the older versions of Halloween, it’s a timewhen the borders between life and death become porous.

But I was on a morning train rolling north from King’s Cross inLondon, gazing out the window as London’s density dissipated intolower and lower buildings spread farther and farther apart. And then the train was rolling through farmland, with grazing sheep and cowsand wheat fields and clusters of bare trees, beautiful even under a wintrywhite sky. I had an errand or perhaps a quest to carry out. I waslooking for some trees—perhapsa Cox’s orange pippin apple tree andsome other fruit trees—for Sam Green, who’s a documentary filmmakerand one of my closest friends. He and I had been talking abouttrees, and more often emailing about them, for several years. Weshared a love for them and the sense that someday he might be makinga documentary about them, or we might join forces to make somekind of art about them.

Sam had found solace and joy in trees in the hard year after hisyounger brother died in 2009, and I think we both loved the sense ofsteadfast continuity a tree can represent. I had grown up in a rollingCalifornia landscape studded with several kinds of oak trees alongwith bays and buckeyes. Many individual trees that I knew as a childare still recognizable when I return, so little changed when I havechanged so much. At the other end of the county was Muir Woods,the famous redwood forest of old-growthtrees left uncut when therest of the area was logged, trees a couple hundred feet tall with needlesthat condense moisture out of the air on foggy days and drip itonto the soil as a sort of summer rain that only falls under the canopyand not in the open air.

Slices of redwood trees a dozen or more feet across, with their annualrings used as history charts, were popular in my youth, and thearrival of Columbus in the Americas or the signing of the Magna Cartaand sometimes the birth and death of Jesus would be marked on thehuge disks in museums and parks. The oldest redwood in Muir Woodsis 1,200 years old, so more than half its time on Earth had passed before the first Europeans showed up in what they would name California. Atree planted tomorrow that lived as long would be standing in thethirty-thirdcentury ad, and it would be short-livedcompared to thebristlecones a few hundred miles east, which can live five thousandyears. Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it theway they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and peoplehave found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, andgardens. The surrealist artist Man Ray fled Europe and Nazis in 1940and spent the next decade in California. During the Second WorldWar, he visited the sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada and wrote ofthese trees that are broader than redwoods, but not quite as tall: “Theirsilence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, thanthe reverberating thunder in [the] Grand Canyon, than the burstingof bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias,one hundred yards above one’s head, are too far away to be heard. Irecalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first monthsof the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that hadprobably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing Icould be transformed into a tree until peace came again.”

That summer before my trip to England, when Sam was in town,we had gone to admire the trees planted in San Francisco by MaryEllen Pleasant, a Black woman born in slavery around 1812, who hadbecome a heroine of the Underground Railroad and a civil rights activist,as well as a player in the elite money politics of San Francisco.She had died more than a hundred years before that day we stood under her eucalyptus trees, which felt as though they were the livingwitnesses of a past otherwise beyond our reach. They had outlivedthe wooden mansion in which some of the dramas of her life hadplayed out. They were so broad they had buckled the sidewalk, andthey reached up higher than most of the buildings around them.Their peeling gray and tan bark spiraled around their trunks, theirsickle-shapedleaves lay scattered on the sidewalk, and the wind murmuredin their crowns. The trees made the past seem within reach ina way nothing else could: here were living things that had beenplanted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees thathad been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we weregone. They changed the shape of time.

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of timelived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about ahundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of timeduring which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum,and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the SpanishCivil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon isgone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longertime scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemeralitythe way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.

In Moscow there are trees planted during the Czarist era thatgrew, shed their leaves in fall, stood steadfast through the winters,bloomed in springs through the Russian Revolution, shaded visitorsin summers in the Stalinist era, through the purges, the show trials,the famines, the Cold War and glasnost and the collapse of the SovietUnion, dropped their leaves during the autumns of the rise of thatadmirer of Stalin, Vladimir Putin, and that will outlive Putin andSam and me and everyone on that train with me that November morning. The trees were reminders of both our own ephemeralityand their endurance long beyond ours, and in their uprightness theystood in the landscape like guardians and witnesses.

Also that summer, when we were hanging out at my home talkingabout trees, I had mentioned an essay by George Orwell I had lovedfor a long time, a brief, casual, lyrical piece he dashed off in the springof 1946 for Tribune, the socialist weekly where he published abouteighty pieces from 1943 to 1947. The essay that appeared on April 26,1946, is titled “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” and it’s a triumphof meandering that begins by describing a yew tree in a Berkshirechurchyard said to have been planted by a vicar who was afamously fickle political player, switching sides repeatedly in the religiouswars of the time. That fickleness let him survive and stay inplace, like a tree, while many fell or fled.

Orwell writes of the vicar, “Yet, after this lapse of time, all that isleft of him is a comic song and a beautiful tree, which has rested theeyes of generation after generation and must surely have outweighedany bad effects which he produced by his political quislingism.” Fromthere Orwell leapt to the last king of Burma, whose supposed misdeedshe mentioned, along with the trees that king planted in Mandalay,“tamarind trees which cast a pleasant shade until the Japaneseincendiary bombs burned them down in 1942.” Orwell had been apoliceman in the British imperial service in Burma, so he would haveseen those trees for himself in the 1920s, as well as the huge yew hedescribed in the church cemetery in Bray, a small town west ofLondon.

He proposes that “the planting of a tree, especially one of the long-livinghardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity atalmost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes rootit will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, goodor evil.” And then he mentioned the inexpensive roses and fruit treeshe had planted himself, ten years earlier, and how he had revisitedthem recently and in them beheld his own modest botanical contributionto posterity. “One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushesdied, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit trees,seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and sixpence.*These plants have not entailed much work, and have had nothingspent on them beyond the original amount. They never even receivedany manure, except what I occasionally collected in a bucket whenone of the farm horses happened to have halted outside the gate.”

I’d derived from that last line a picture of the author with a bucketand a gate beyond which horses passed, but I hadn’t thought moreabout where and how he lived at the time and why he planted roses.Nevertheless, I had found the essay memorable and moving from thetime I first encountered it. I thought it was a fugitive trace of anOrwell that remained embryonic, undeveloped, of who he might havebeen in less turbulent times, but I was wrong about that.

His life was shot through with wars. He was born on June 25,1903, right after the Boer War, reached adolescence during the FirstWorld War (a patriotic poem, written when he was eleven, was hisfirst published work), with the Russian Revolution and the Irishwar of independence raging into the 1920s and the beginning ofhis adulthood, been among those who saw all through the 1930s the conflagrations of the Second World War being set up, who fought inthe Spanish Civil War in 1937, had lived in London during the Blitzand been bombed out himself, and coined the term cold war in 1945and saw that cold war and its nuclear arsenals grow more fearsome inthe last years before his death on January 21, 1950. Those conflictsand menaces consumed a lot of his attention—butnot all of it.

had first read his essay on tree planting in a big, ugly, dog-eared paperback titled The Orwell Reader, which I bought cheap from aused bookstore when I was about twenty and wandered through foryears, getting to know his style and tone as an essayist, his opinionsabout other writers, about politics, about language and writing, abook I had absorbed when I was young enough for it to be a foundationalinfluence on my own meander toward becoming an essayist. Ihad come across his 1945 fable Animal Farm as a child, so that I firstread it as a story about animals and mourned the faithful horse Boxer’sdeath and not known that it was an allegory for the corruption of theRussian Revolution into Stalinism.

I’d read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time as a teenager, and then gotten to know Homage to Catalonia, his firsthand account ofthe Spanish Civil War, in my twenties. That latter book had been amajor influence on my second book, Savage Dreams, for its example ofhonesty about the shortcomings of one’s own side and loyalty to itanyway and of how to incorporate into a political narrative personalexperience all the way down to doubts and discomforts—thatis, howto make room for the small and subjective inside something big andhistoric. He had been one of my principal literary influences, but Ihad not gotten to know more about him than what he revealed in thebooks and whatever set of assumptions was ambient.

That essay of his I shared with Sam was in praise of the arboreal saeculum, and it was hopeful in that it looked to the future as somethingwe could contribute to and, more than that, in that year afterthe first atom bombs had been detonated, as something we couldhave some degree of faith in: “Even an apple tree is liable to live forabout 100 years, so that the Cox I planted in 1936 may still be bearingfruit well into the twenty-firstcentury. An oak or a beech may livefor hundreds of years and be a pleasure to thousands or tens of thousandsof people before it is finally sawn up into timber. I am not suggestingthat one can discharge all one’s obligations towards society bymeans of a private re‑afforestationscheme. Still, it might not be a badidea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it inyour diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn intothe ground.” The essay took a tone common in his work, travelingnonchalantly from particulars to generalities, and from the minor tothe major—inthis case from one particular apple tree to universalquestions of redemption and legacies.

That summer day when we fell to talking about trees, I told Sam about Orwell’s garden, and he grew excited, and we went over to my computer to see if we could find out if the five fruit trees were still there. It took only a few minutes to dig up the address of the cottage Orwell had moved to in April 1936 and then a minute or two more to zoom in on the address on a mapping app, but the aerial views were full of indistinct blobs of green foliage that didn’t tell us what wewanted to know.

Sam wrote a letter to the unknown inhabitants of the address we’d found, which was far more Sam wrote a letter to the unknown inhabitants of the addresswe’d found, which was far more rural than the place I’d pictured allthose years since I’d first read the essay. It was a very Sam letterthat noted that “we are not kooks,” offering the links to his websiteand mine to try to demonstrate that we were people who had a respectable history of taking interest in obscure facts and researchinghistorical tangents. We hadn’t heard back when I stepped off thetrain in Baldock in Hertfordshire, several stops before Cambridge, alittle wobbly, a little anxious about knocking on that cottage door, butalso more than a little exhilarated.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8100 × 5.4600 × 8.4200 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780593083376
ISBN-10	0593083377
Author	Rebecca Solnit
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	NAT000000, LIT025020
Subjects	nerd gifts, nature, gifts for book lovers, biographies of famous people, animal farm, NAT000000, book lovers gifts, book lover, literary criticism, book gifts, literary gifts, book lover gifts, literary biographies, british gifts, LIT025020, men explain things to me, rebecca solnit books, george orwell books, orwell, autobiography, biography, Animals, animal books, book lovers, library, anthology, book club, gardening, autobiographies, George Orwell, wildlife, biographies, nature books, gardening books, gardening gifts, essays, gifts for readers, 1984