Wanderlust
Subtitle: A History of Walking
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Published: June 5, 2001
Language: eng
Number of pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780140286014
Subjects: Walking History; Hiking--History; Voyages and travels
First sentence: Where does it start?
Description: In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--to create a portrait of the range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history signifies walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit hones in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of the mountaineers.

Solnit's book finds a profound relationship between walking and thinking, walking and culture, and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in whice to walk in an evermore automobile-dependent and accelerated world.
Table of contents: pagenum: ix
class: section
title: Acknowledgements; pagenum: 1
title: THE PACE OF THOUGHTS
label: I; pagenum: 3
title: Tracing a Headland: An Introduction
label: 1; pagenum: 14
label: 2
title: The Mind at Three Miles an Hour; pagenum: 30
label: 3
title: Rising and Falling: The Theorists of Bipedalism; pagenum: 45
title: The Uphill Road to Grace: Some Pilgrimages
label: 4; pagenum: 64
title: Labryrinths and Cadillacs: Walking into the Realm of the Symbolic
label: 5; pagenum: 79
label: II
title: FROM THE GARDEN TO THE WILD; pagenum: 81
label: 6
title: The Path Out of the Garden; pagenum: 104
label: 7
title: The Legs of William Wordsworth; pagenum: 118
title: A Thousand Miles of Conventional Sentiment: The Literature of Walking
label: 8; pagenum: 133
title: Mount Obscurity and Mount Arrival
label: 9; pagenum: 148
title: Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars
label: 10; pagenum: 169
label: III
title: LIVES OF THE STREETS; pagenum: 171
title: The Solitary Stroller and the City
label: 11; pagenum: 196
label: 12
title: Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt; pagenum: 214
title: Citizens of the Streets: Parties, Processions, and Revolutions
label: 13; pagenum: 232
title: Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Space
label: 14; pagenum: 247
title: PAST THE END OF THE ROAD
label: IV; pagenum: 249
title: Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche
label: 15; pagenum: 267
label: 16
title: The Shape of a Walk; pagenum: 277
title: Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two Points
label: 17; pagenum: 293
title: Notes; pagenum: 319
title: Index; pagenum: 325
title: Sources for Foot Quotations