The Beginning Comes After the End (Independent Bookstore Edition): Notes on a World of Change

Description

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Offering a refreshing perspective on progress, Rebecca Solnit’s thought-provoking writing highlights how slow, consistent activism can bring lasting change.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

LOS ANGELES TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798888908785

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Publication date: 04/21/2026

Pages: 160

Product dimensions: 7.50(w) x 5.25(h) x 0.00(d)

Paperback

ISBN-13: 9798888904510

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Publication date: 03/03/2026

Pages: 160

Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act.