Solnit, bookspreading.
Solnit, bookspreading. Adrian Mendoza

Until 9:00 p.m. PST tonight, Haymarket is offering a free ebook of Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

The book, which has recently been reissued with a new forward and afterward, is a collection of brief essays about recent successful actions that don't haven't received much attention or that have been seen as secondary to a larger narrative. She touches, to name a few examples, on the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Zapatistas, the WTO protests in downtown Seattle, marches agains the Iraq War, and also examples of movements composed of groups who have worked together despite deeply held ideological differences.

If you’ve used accused anyone of mansplaining as they were manspreading while riding mass mansit, then Solnit's recent work on the way misogyny expresses itself in day-to-day interactions has already touched you. As Lily Rothman writes in the Atlantic, though Solnit didn't invent the portmanteau "mansplaining," the word popped up a month after she published in the LA Times her widely read essay, Men Who Explain Things, giving name to yet another indignity suffered by women daily and also ushering in a new era of men prefacing their sentences with, “Well, I don’t mean to mansplain, but…”

In any case, Solnit's been an activist for a long time, so the book is also full of just plain ol' advice on how to be a human while you’re fighting for humanity. This passage in particular made much of my morning possible today:

Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that’s austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited. The great human rights activist and Irish nationalist Roger Casement investigated horrific torture and genocide in South America’s Putamayo rainforest a century ago and campaigned to end it. While on this somber task, his journal reveals, he found time to admire handsome local men and to chase brilliantly colored local butterflies. Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.

Haymarket Books also suggests you check out other books its catalogue, and I do, too:

• Angela Y Davis's Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

• Justin Akers Chacón's and Mike Davis's No One Is Illegal

Also, Ansel talked to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and their conversation is well worth your time.