Orwell's Roses
By Rebecca Solnit
- Genre
- Art, Culture & Creative Life
- Publisher
- Viking (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9780593083369
Orwell's Roses is a work of nonfiction by the essayist Rebecca Solnit, published by Viking in October 2021. Beginning with the roses George Orwell planted in 1936, it reconsiders his life and links beauty, pleasure and politics. It was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a TIME...
In 1936 George Orwell planted roses in his garden, and Rebecca Solnit builds an entire book from that small, surprising fact. Orwell's Roses uses the flowers as a way into a fresh portrait of the writer - not only the grim prophet of totalitarianism but a man who prized pleasure, beauty and the natural world as necessities, not distractions. From there Solnit ranges outward, to Stalin's fraudulent botany, the industrial rose farms of Colombia, and the politics of joy under oppression. It is an essay in the truest sense: a mind following its curiosity wherever it leads, trusting the reader to follow. intendle recommends it for anyone who believes that resistance and delight can share a life. A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a TIME must-read of 2021, it is characteristic Solnit - digressive, luminous and quietly insistent that bread is not enough. A book about why we need roses too.