A Review of "Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility," edited by Rebecca Solnit & Thelma Young Lutunatabua

 

It’s not lost on me that I’m reading Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (Haymarket Books) as I take a fuel-guzzling flight cross country. As much as the 28 essays that Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua have gathered provide hope, ammunition, community, congratulations for small gains along the way, as much as I don’t need to be in the slightest convinced that our human-caused climate crisis is destroying our planet (I also have recently left Maui a mere four days before Lahaina was consumed), I stand accused, too. And let’s not even get to our beloved vintage gas-burning Wedgewood stove….

Of course, how can’t we all take the boiling/flooding/drought-stricken/on fire end of the world personally? A collection like Not Too Late by its very nature tends to speak more to the converted no matter how hard its authors hope otherwise, and even the converted among us always yearn we might somehow be exceptions. It certainly helps that’s it’s only a few pages into the book when co-editor Lutunatabua asserts, “The question shouldn’t be Will my actions be enough? but Will our actions be enough? This is a communal quest in which everyone can bring their talents, visions, desires, access—and if one person struggles, we can help each other up.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

A Review of "Orwell's Roses"

 

Think of Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses as a whydunit. Beyond admitting how much he influenced her as a writer/journalist/activist, Solnit was also moved to learn of the rose bushes Orwell planted by his countryside English cottage in Wallington. Planting fruit trees made a certain practical sense, but roses fed no one. 

 That would be the too facile conclusion one might have before reading Solnit’s lovely, hopeful book. Despite relatively harrowing, clear-eyed passages about our current climate crisis and about the vicious Stalin-led starving of Ukraine in the 1930s, Solnit also succeeds at what she claims Orwell accomplishes. Both calm yet crusading writers help us witness “imperfect and unidealized beauty.” That is, see the world we live in.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on November 25, 2025.