This Is Now with Angie Coiro: Rebecca Solnit

Please note this event was rescheduled from April 26, 2026

The indefatigable and incomparable Rebecca Solnit returns to Kepler’s with The Beginning Comes After the End, described as an “urgent manifesto for our tumultuous time” (Los Angeles Times). This is the book for this moment when, as Solnit argues, our increasingly fascistic society is so volatile and dangerous precisely because it is failing, because it is on the verge of collapse. Ultimately, this is a vision of hope.

About the Book

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, 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. 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. The backlash from our leaders is real, and it is dangerous. But, as the New York Times puts it, “the current rise of authoritarianism is the dying gasp of an old world order, and we are on the precipice of living in a multicultural and interconnected world.”

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.

About the Speaker

photo credit: trent davis bailey

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. Her newsletter of essays and analyses can be found at meditationsinanemergency.com.…