Muybridge, Eadweard. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit.

Viking, 2003. 1st printing, hardcover with protected dust jacket. 305 pages. Illustrated. In this notable volume, Solnit, a gifted writer, provides a compelling narrative placing Muybridge, who was a leader in Western landscape photography and an innovator in the field of motion pictures, in the context of his times. "Rebecca Solnit is one of the most agile, protean, and consistently (jaw-droppingly) fascinating writers of the current generation; and with this, her latest and finest work, that crusty old shape-shifter Eadweard Muybridge may finally have met his match. . . . she writes like an angel." Lawrence Weschler. "[A] brilliant essay on Muybridge and all he begat....RIVER OF SHADOWS is never less than deeply intelligent, and often very close to inspired....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." New York Times Book Review - Jim Lewis (03/30/2003). "Her sweeping narrative situates Muybridge within the history of California as a place of technological innovation and epitome of westward expansion and renvention. Solnit, a highly original voice with an eloquent prose style, has published numerous works focusing on California artists, the American West, and landscape. River of Shadows benefits from her keen understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history and reflects back on the author's other subject interests." Sarah Ziebell Mann, Moving Image, Fall 2004. "[I]t is hard to do justice to Solnit's far-reaching perspective....Her prose, terse and poetic, makes the book a pleasurably dizzying experience." Bookforum - Luc Santé. In the literature of photography, Solnit has made notable contributions to such publications as Aperture, No. 120 and 164; Beyond Wilderness; Nuclear Matters (San Francisco Camerawork, 1991); Points of Entry: Tracing Cultures (Friends of Photography, 1995); and Virginia Beahan & Laura McPhee, No Ordinary Land: Encounters in a Strange Environment (1998). Fine with small line from black felt marker at bottom of text block near spine.