“Solnit has the wide-foraging mind of a great essayist and the West-besotted soul of the recording secretary for your local historical society. a book of enormous intelligence and fascination.” has rescued a strange, inexplicable fellow from mere histories of photography. It belongs to that wondrous class of books-like William Gass’s On Being Blue and Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet-in which an extraordinary mind seizes hold of an unexpected topic and renders it with such confidence, subtlety and grace that one finds it hard to remember what things looked like before the book appeared in the world.” “Never less than deeply intelligent, and often very close to inspired. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries-Hollywood and Silicon Valley-that have most powerfully defined contemporary society. The story of Muybridge-who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically-becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell’s Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation

“A panoramic vision of cultural change” - The New York Times

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology

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