Rebecca Solnit - River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

Praise for
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge
and the Technological Wild West
by Rebecca Solnit

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Book Award, and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award

A brilliant essay on Muybridge and all he begat. It is, all at once and in no particular order, a brief summation of a mans life, a meditation on time, image, and motion, a history of the American West as a fount of technological innovation and perceptual change, and a beautiful piece of prose. In Solnits hands, Muybridges motion studies become not just clever curiosities but a sudden reach into a whole new dimension, like that moment in ancient stone-carving when friezes shed their backgrounds and sculpture was invented... the writing is fast and sure, as nimble as an acrobat and much more entertaining... River of Shadows is never less than deeply intelligent, and often very close to inspired. It belongs to that wondrous class of bookslike William Gasss On Being Blue and Anne Carsons Eros the Bittersweetin which an extraordinary mind seizes hold of an unexpected topic and renders it with such confidence, subtlety and grace that one finds it hard to remember what things looked like before the book appeared in the world.

Jim Lewis, The New York Times Book Review

Extraordinary... it is hard to do justice to Solnits far-reaching perspective. We observe the shadowy Muybridge walking, as if in his motion studies, against a continuously unspooling panorama of nineteenth-century America, so that Solnit is able to link, say, Sitting Bulls pipe-smoking break during a pitched battle in 1872 with the Great Strike that nearly changed the countrys course five years later, and both events with Muybridges bridging of space and time. Her prose, terse and poetic, makes the book a pleasurably dizzying page-turner.

Luc Sante, Bookforum

Like a Mike Davis, Marshall Berman, or Simon Schama, Solnit is a cultural historian in the desert-mystic mode, trailing ideas like swarms of butterflies.

John Leonard, Harpers

Rebecca Solnit has the wide-foraging mind of a great essayist and the West-besotted soul of the recording secretary for your local historical society... she raises free association to a fine art, finding patterns and ideas with ravenous curiosity. A San Franciscan, shes who Susan Sontag might have become if Sontag had never forsaken California for Manhattan.... River of Shadows isnt traditional biography any more than Dava Sobels Longitude was... Solnits prose combines the imagery of a poet, the ideas of a theoretician, the rhythm of a thoroughbred and the force of a Southern Pacific locomotive... a book whose cantering intelligence keeps it, from first to last, airborne.

David Kipen, San Franciso Chronicle

This is a biography of an era, not a man... River of Shadows uses Muybridges life and work to construct a panoramic vision of cultural change.... Look closely, and it may illumine the contemporary scene, for modernity and its transformations still inspire impassioned enmity in the midst of expanded possibilities.

Edward Rothstein, The New York Times

Fans of Western Americana will know the outlines of Muybridges story, but Solnit fills it with fresh research and lively writing. She calls on a dazzling range of information [and] revels in establishing new connections between old names and faces. Her gift for synthesis, her supple grasp of history and her ability to shift smoothly from fact to metaphor without warning recalls another artful American writer: Henry Adams.

Mary Panzer, Chicago Tribune

A beautiful work of art equal to its protean subject... Solnit has emerged as one of our most gifted freelance intellectuals. Part historian, part biographer, part philosopher of technology, Solnit gives us in River of Shadows the gift of understanding who weve become and how, in prose that maintains, sentence by sentence, the luminescent clarity of a Muybridge landscape... Solnit paints a vivid portrait of San Francisco in the Gold Rush years... she has a knack for revealing a whole milieu in an anecdote.... In giving us a biography of Muybridge and an assessment of his work, Solnit has also given us a shadow biography of the modern selfself that dwells less and less in the ancient, organic world, and more and more in a world ruled by images.

Philip Connors, Newsday (New York)

River of Shadows is a perfect example of a subject waitingin this case for almost a century and a halffor the appropriate writer to come along to unlock its concealed meaning and unexpected relevance. The subject is Eadweard Muybridge the photographer and Eadweard Muybridge the phenomenon, and together they have brought out in Solnit a book so spirited and free-ranging, so Western in its unfettered questing curiosity, that its genre is not easy to define. This portrait of a man, a place, a time, a technology, an art and various other matters that elude encapsulation shines on nearly every page with rigor and gusto and is consistently a delight to read.... Using Muybridge as her conduit, Solnit builds a case for California having produced an alternative modernism, a kind of balancing pendant to the artistic and literary modernism that emerged in Paris in the nineteenth century.... Muybridges biographical vacuum seems to bring out in Solnits thinking and writing an ever more balletic curiosity, as she finds and makes shapes, associations and connections among the various themes in his photographs that even he may have not seen or maybe even intended.

Michael Frank, Los Angeles Times

Solnit documents a crucial phase of photographys transformation from a static adjunct of portraiture to something far more dynamic, cogent, and liberating. In Muybridge she found an icon for everything disreputable and admirable about a time of rapid change.

David Brin, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Solnit has been moved to print by Muybridge, and the result is rich and rewarding.... She has rescued a strange, inexplicable fellow from from mere histories of photography. After this book, it will not be possible to think of Muybridge as less than one of the great uneasy Victorians... a book of enormous intelligence and fascination.

David Thomson, The New Republic

Solnit, an original and penetrating thinker with a gift for inventive metaphors and syntactical grace, brings her fascination with the American West, photography, and technologys impact on the environment and culture to the study of the man who made motion pictures possible... masterly and creative, Solnits far-roaming synthesis is as unsettling as it is compelling.

Donna Seaman, Booklist

PENGUIN BOOKS

RIVER OF SHADOWS

Rebecca Solnit is a writer whose work focuses on issues of environment, landscape, and place. She is the author of Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era; Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West; A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. In 2003, she was the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award. She lives in California.