The Mother of All Questions (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
In this dynamic collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit deftly weaves commentary on current events, the lives of women authors and historians, and her personal experience as a writer to condemn misogyny and explore resistance to violence in all its forms. It’s a companion book to her bestseller, Men Explain Things to Me, but also stands alone as a commanding selection of ideas about gender, agency, and power in our times. With audacity, intelligence, and grace, Rebecca Solnit expertly suggests the answer to The Mother of All Questions lies in the asking. -Katie
— From Spring Booknotes 2017
This essential collection of recent essays by feminist writer Rebecca Solnit should be on everyone's bookshelf. Crack it open and read "A Short History of Silence' or "Men Explain Lolita to Me."
— From KarenDescription
In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.
About the Author
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including the books Men Explain Things to Me and Hope in the Dark, both also with Haymarket; a trilogy of atlases of American cities; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper's and a regular contributor to the Guardian.
