Wanderlust: A History of Walking [Paperback]

But there are pleasant intervals. The most interesting parts of the book are when Solnit writes of her walking experiences. Her first person narratives draw the reader into a lively cadence when she describes her inner-city walks in San Francisco, her pilgrimage to Chimayo and her people-watching jaunt along the Las Vegas Strip.

Solnit is a gifted writer who is extremely fluent. It's unfortunate that she ambled about unrelated activities and chose the experiences and words of others when she could write much more interestingly about her own walks. As an avid walker, I was disappointed with her book.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth were vigorous walkers. Wordsworth and his peers seem to be the founders of a tradition. The English landscape garden asked to be explored. The emphasis on the pictorial and the existence of scenic tourism were invented in the eighteenth century. Walks are everywhere in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. The garden walk provided relief form the group. Wordsworth tried to understand the French Revolution by walking the streets of Paris. Walking was Wordsworth's means of composition. Hazlitt's essay on walking became the foundation of a genre. Bruce Chatwin did not distinguish nomadism from walking. John Muir went from Indianapolis to the Florida Keys in 1867. Since English mountaineers found the Alpine Club in 1857, outdoor organizations have been proliferating. The first High Trip under the auspices of the Sierra Club took place in 1901. A taste for the wilderness is culturally determined. Everywhere but in Britain, walking became hiking. In England and elsewhere there was a problem of access to the land. The Highland Clearances,1780-1855, for one example, displaced quantities of people. In 1824 the Association for the Protection of Ancient Footpaths was founded near York. Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of land ownership but on paths, a sort of circulatory system of the whole. The YMCA was an early sponsor of walking clubs. The history of both urban and rural walking is a history of freedom. Dickens indicated the other things urban walking can be--police, detectives, criminals. Virginia Woolf, daughter of a great walker, wrote an essay on urban walking. Walter Benjamin described the Paris street, now a landscape, now a room. Hannah Arendt wrote in the 1960's one could feel at home In Paris.

The book is carammed full of literary and cultural studies. The few autobiographical sections and sentences are the most moving. The reader is physically transported to mountain tops, labyrinths, and to that in-between state, the liminal state, achieved through the rhythm of walking, being situated between one's past and future identities. Citizens in the street support democracies from the time of the French Revolution to 1989 when history was made in the streets of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. Walking has been an established aspect of courtship. There is a dark side. Merely walking in the wrong place or at the wrong time could place a woman under suspicion of wrongdoing. Sylvia Plath wrote that being born a woman was her awful tragedy. Women are the primary targets of sexualized violence.

Freedom to walk is useless without some place to go. Work and home were never separate until the factory system came of age. People cannot walk easily through suburban sprawl. Walking can become a sign of powerlessness. In the nineteenth century train travel changed perceptions of time and place. Suburbs make walking ineffective as transportation. Factories isolate, suburbs isolate: the body has ceased to be utilitarian to the upscale consumer of outdoor gear and exercise equipment, but is recreational. England remains pedestrian in scale. The contemporary artist most dedicted to exploring walking in his art is English, Richard Long. In some respects his work resembles travel writing. The book ends in Las Vegas. The city is unfriendly to pedestrians. The development of the super casinos and the automobile-free strip support the interests and the curiosity of walkers and traveliers. Bravo to Rebecca Solnit for her engaging work.