All Intensive Purposes

This week's New Yorker includes this brief review of A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

This meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting lost is -- as befits its subject -- less a coherent argument than a series of peregrinations, leading the reader to unexpected vistas. The word "lost," Solnit informs us, derives from the Old Norse for disbanding an army, and she extrapolates from this the idea of striking "a truce with the wide world." It's the wideness of the world that entices: a map of this deceptively slender volume would include hermit crabs, who live in scavenged shells; marauding conquistadors; an immigrant grandmother committed to an asylum; white frontier children kidnapped by Indians; and Hitchcock's "Vertigo." Solnit imagines a long-distance runner accumulating moments when neither foot is on the ground, "tiny fragments of levitation," and argues, by analogy, that in relinquishing certainty we approach, if only fleetingly, the divine.

August 8 & 15, 2005, p.93.

Previous Field Guide posts here and here, and here and here. Also in the New Yorker: a fine discussion of Edmund Wilson by Louis Menand, which occasioned this column by Jon Carroll in today's San Francisco Chronicle.