Wanderlust

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.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.