This book aims to give hope to a reader depressed about the state of the world, and serve as a critique of the ways leftists tend to underrecognize their accomplishments. I am mixed on how good it did its job.

Solnit makes correct observations about the tendency on the left to take nothing but a full socialist revolution as a success, and to downplay or even actively trash on forms of incremental progress. These forms of incremental progress often form the essential basis for something bigger, but the overly defeatist attitude leads to people doing away with them and thus never making progress at all.

This part of the book is very important and relevant. Activist burnout is a major problem, and it is often caused by people feeling so demoralized over the vastness of the issues they face, and the lack of what they feel is meaningful progress.

My issues with the book comes from the praise of methods of activism which I believe are actually a hindrance to progress. Solnit holds up activism for the sake of activism, regardless of efficacy. Her view that as long as people tried and felt happy with community, then the action was valuable. While I don't disagree that joy and community are essential to prevent burnout, this attitude that treats all activism as equal regardless of efficacy becomes absurd when you realize we're talking about people's lives.

All activism is not equal, and we can't blanket praise anything that involves positive emotions. So much of the problem in activism today is the lack of organization and the emphasis on feel-good moments of passion. Everyone marches together, but then where do they go from there?

Leadership should be questioned, yes, but spontaneous acts and lack of structure are not what's going to create the bulk of progress, and the author's unquestioning assertion that this is what we should be encouraging because it feels good is irresponsible.

A lot of her examples of successful activist movements also don't ring so hopeful now, which is a consequence of the book being published quite a bit ago. The author can't be blamed for not knowing what the results would be. Though it is frustrating to see her cite attempts to get people terrified of GMOs as successful activism, as anti-GMO is entirely anti-scientific and a waste of time when real issues of food injustice could be being fought. Her other examples tended to be small-scale gestures that didn't end up succeeding and in many cases the issues have gotten worse.

Again, I don't want to discount Solnit's belief in the power of small-scale gestures and community. Sometimes these things make a difference in ways we never could have predicted. But to use them as reasons to hope and encourage this sort of activism as enough when we are seeing the consistent failures of the left to make meaningful progress or organization even when passionate about an issue, doesn't actually give a reason to hope for these issues.

But I do agree with her message around acknowledging and celebrating incremental change, and understanding activism will be an eternal struggle, not something that is ever going to be won by some single grand revolution that we all must wait for.