Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

Almost the entirety of the essay is contained within its title. The title pretty much says it all, and the essay doesn't take you into any more depth. Take, for example, the title essay of 'Men Explain Things to Me'.

I get that.īut, unfortunately, that's where the positive ended for me. There is something very wonderful about someone putting into words an experience that up until this point you haven’t known how to explain. I keep seeing anecdotes from other reviewers on how men have tried to explain things to them in their lives. I think the strength of this book - and the reason it has done so well - is that it’s main concept will make sense to a lot of women.

Compare this to Roxane Gay or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ( Bad Feminist, Hunger, We Should All Be Feminists, Dear Ijeawele) and it pales in comparison. Men Explain Things to Me was a natural choice for my TBR, but the writing quality is just okay, not very evocative or engaging, and the ideas are very basic.

And I just think I may have been spoiled by better essay writers than Solnit. Overall, I don't read a lot of nonfiction, but when I do, it is often in the form of feminist essays. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub. Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award).

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit