12 books to help you fight the system

Rebecca Solnit (Image Credit: Sallie Dean Shatz/Viking Books)

8. Hope in the Dark

I’m willing to bet good money that you’ve been feeling pretty grim lately. Even if you were somehow happy about the results of the 2016 election (and,if so, congrats for making it this far into my list of mostly progressive resistance literature), you might still feel concerned. It is now painfully apparent that our world is roiling with conflict and confusion. It may seem very dark indeed.

However, that is not an invitation to give up. Neither is it encouragement to descend into sentimentality or hackneyed observations; if I hear another person talk about how good art is going to be under a Trump presidency, I’m going to flip a table. Instead, perhaps we should turn to an empowering view of the future that holds no illusions about the past or the work that still needs to be done.

Hope in the Dark is foundational to that view. In the days immediately following the election, publisher Haymarket Books offered this book, by author Rebecca Solnit, for free. That’s no longer the case, though it is possible to get the ebook from Haymarket (which describes itself as a “radically independent” publisher).

Solnit’s book was written in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, under then-president George W. Bush. It has since become even more vital in the ensuing years. In it, Solnit argues that despair is the result, in large part, of lost perspective. Progress, she says, is often the result of incremental, almost unnoticeable actions that build and build until we are living in a vastly changed world. Hope in the Dark holds no illusions about the work necessary to continue building, but it offers some much-needed history and strength.