Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist. Her books include A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (1997), Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (2000), As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001), and most recently River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003). She is a columnist for Orion, and a regular contributor to the Nation Institute's TomDispatch daily newsgram.