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Staff Book Review: No Straight Road Takes You There

Image of the yellow book cover with white text on a desk with vines growing nearby

Book review by Phil, Information Specialist

No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, by Rebecca Solnit, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2025. 176 pages.

The central thread weaving through Rebecca Solnit’s recent collection of essays is the idea of hope.

Hope, she writes, in the essay, "Despair is a Luxury": “...stands in opposition to despair, defeatism and pessimism. And I would argue, optimism. What all these enemies of hope have in common is confidence about what is going to happen, a false certainty that excuses inaction.”

In the essay, "Tortoise at the Mayfly Party", Solnit extols the virtue of looking at ‘deep time’, to see that change can happen over periods of time that exceed our short-term vision, and that imperfection and unpredictability can result in improvements. 

In "Truce with the Trees", she tells the story of Kronos Quartet’s David Hannington’s 300-year-old violin, the climate that shaped the tree and created its sound, and the need for sustainability as a central economic tenet.

Feminism, Harvey Weinstein, power and its abuses, abortion as an economic issue and fascism are all eloquently discussed. There is no magic bullet, she writes, at the end of the essay, "Changing the Climate Story": “Instead, there are thousands of answers - at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be”. Every essay is a moment to reflect as a reader, and to keep moving forward.

She ends her collection with a prayer in "Credo": “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not giving up, and neither am I.”

If you liked No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, Phil has created a reading list with similar titles you may want to explore.

This review was originally published in the Saturday, January 24, 2026 edition of the Waterloo Region Record as part of the "At the Library" feature. This regular feature shares reading experiences and recommendations from local library staff.