Walking, says Solnit (Savage Dreams A Book of Migrations), is the state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned thus she begins with the long historical association between walking and philosophizing.

This pleasing and enlightening history of pedestrianism unfolds like a walking conversation with a particularly well-informed companion with wide-ranging interests. Walking, as Thoreau said and Solnit elegantly demonstrates, inevitably leads to other subjects. With profiles of some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction, from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Rousseau to Argentina's Mother of the Plaza de Mayo, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja, Wanderlust offers a provocative and profound examination of the interplay between the body, the imagination, and the world around the walker. Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers.

What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories to create a range of possibilities for this most basic act. A reissue of the profound and meandering modern classic about the historical, political and philosophical paths traced by walkers, their routes and the act of walking itself.

Rebecca solnit walking