Book Review: The Beginning Comes After the End

[enuja]

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Rebecca Solnit. 2026

I follow Rebecca Solnit on both Facebook and BlueSky, which is why I knew that her short new book with a pink cover, which is one long essay, was published in March. I went to a local independent bookstore to buy it, and I ended up buying a bunch of other books, as well.

It's a short book and a finely written essay, so I should have been able to read it quickly. But I'm just completely out of the habit of focusing on books, and it's taken me forever to finish this. But that's not a problem with the book: it's a problem with my current habits.

The book is a kind of a sequel to "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities," which Solnit originally published in 2004. I bought "Hope in the Dark" last year, as a way to steel myself to fight back against the second Trump administration, but "Hope in the Dark," despite its updated chapters, felt quite dated.

"The Beginning Comes After the End" is absolutely current. And extremely hopeful, without being blind to the problems that exist in the present. Solnit's basic argument here is that progressivism is winning, and Trump and other very serious, deadly retrenchments against progress are the dying spasms of the old system. Solnit is not saying that future progress is inevitable: she's saying that there has been progress, and we can successfully fight for more progress.

You don't have to have read "Hope in the Dark" before you read "Beginning," so maybe instead of being a sequel, it's more like a replacement. If you've read "Hope": great, this is an update. If you haven't read "Hope": great, this is very much a stand alone argument. Either way, read this book, and don't worry about the old one.

"Beginning" is full of well-constructed language and pithy descriptions, such as calling Richard Dawkins an "evolutionary biologist and polemicist." Solnit writes quite a lot of different types of non-fiction. The language here is not nearly as metaphorical and poetic as in "The Faraway Nearby" and "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but it is still extremely well written. It's just more practical and less theoretical and experimental and poetic. It's the perfect writing style for an essay trying to convince as many people as possible.

"The Beginning" was somewhat challenging to read, in the sense that it confronted me with things I disagree with. Solnit starts the book with the experience of being at a land back ceremony, and one of her major points is that we as a society are starting to value and learn from indigenous ways of thinking and acting, which I agree with. However, Solnit also seems to be arguing that indigenous systems are inherently more environmentally good and less exploitative than Western systems, I don't agree with that generalization,* and Solnit didn't change my mind. She didn't even try, actually. Because the point of the book is to convince the reader that the world is fundamentally changing, not to convince the reader of details or the correctness of these large changes.

If you don't believe in anthropogenic climate change, if you don't think feminism is correct and crucial, if you don't believe in DEI, there is nothing in this book to change your mind. Because this book is for people who are already on board with the progressive agenda, and it exists to help push progressives to action by convincing us that action works.

And it's not blind optimism or ignorance of the challenges of current reality. It's difficult to read in that it talks about a lot of sad things from the past and the present. But Solnit brings up the bad things to show how many of them we've fixed, and to convince us to keep doing this difficult, important work.

*On average, I think that systems that have lasted a longer period of time are more likely to be sustainable, but indigenous system change over time, and historically some indigenous groups have destroyed their environments and collapsed their societies. Indigeneity is not inherently sustainable, but all long-lasting societies must learn to be sustainable, or they will not last long.