I will always take with me the concept that an idea can never be reversed, it is something that awakens and cannot be unheard 💪❤️ ( )

Amazing and frustrating in equal measure. ( )

3.5 stars ( )

Weaving together personal experience and careful research, Solnit examines and exposes the patterns and outcomes that arise from the imbalance of patriarchy and living in a man's world. Without bashing all men, she makes it clear that all women live with a degree of fear that they will experience violence at the hands of men for being women. Sobering and salient, the essays eschew despair with intelligent word-smithing and wry chapter images by the artist Ana Teresa Fernandez.

"Sexual assault, like torture, is an attack on a vicim's rights to bodily integrity, to self-determination and self-expression. It's annihilatory, silencing. It intends to rub out the voice and the rights of the victim, who must rise up out of that annihilation to speak. To tell a story and have it and the teller recognized and respected is still one of the best methods we have of overcoming trauma." 106

"And by many measures, including injustice, insatiable greed, and ecological destruction, madness, like meanness, is central to our society, not simply at its edges." 122

"You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it. If you lack words for a phenomenon, an emotion, a situation, you can't talk about it, which means that you can't come together to address it, let alone change it." 129

"Male fury at not having emotional and sexual needs met is far too common, as is the idea that you can rape or punish one woman to get even for what other women have done or not done." 131

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Infinitely depressing and yet we keep fighting on. We must keep fighting. ( )