For my part, I could easily have lost myself in this book for 100 more pages. Solnit's work at its best is as fresh as an orange, and over the past dozen years this prolific Californian has produced a series of consistently provocative books. Savage Dreams (1994) describes what she calls the "hidden wars of the American West," the wars over land use and water rights and the claims of indigenous peoples. Wanderlust (2000) defines itself as "a history of walking" that makes some predictable stops--Wordsworth, pilgrimage--but also asks its readers to consider the protest march as a kind of collective stroll. And Solnit herself presents an interesting profile: a committed urbanist and an outdoorswoman, an environmentalist who knows how to shoot and is also at home with the most sophisticated forms of contemporary art. She's been compared to both Annie Dillard and Susan Sontag and seems, weirdly, to combine them--the naturalist and the modernist--while being more conversant with an archive than either.

Solnit's boldest and most important book to date is River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Born in Britain, Muybridge arrived in San Francisco in 1855 and set up as a bookseller. Soon he was taking photographs as well, and in 1877 he developed the high-speed shutter. Muybridge first used that equipment to take pictures of horses in motion, and the story goes that he did it to win a bet for railroad magnate Leland Stanford, who is said to have wagered that at certain points in its stride a trotter had all four feet off the ground at once. Solnit prints the legend but discounts it, and instead links the robber baron's funding of Muybridge's experiments to his later deed of gift for Stanford University, which specified his interest in engineering and applied science. But River of Shadows offers much more than an account of stop-action photography. Taking her cue from the subjects of Muybridge's oeuvre, Solnit provides an essay on the history of California that moves from Yosemite to the octopus of the railroad, from the state's Indian wars to the astonishing growth of San Francisco. And it makes the startling claim that Muybridge's "annihilation of time and space" lies at the heart of California's modern identity, insofar as it points toward the movies on the one hand and, through his alliance with Stanford, toward Silicon Valley on the other.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a smaller book and in many ways less bold, but it stands out for Solnit's willingness to push harder on her language than she has ever before. Although she's never hidden behind the scrim of objectivity, even her 1997 Irish travel narrative, A Book of Migrations, is touched by a reticence at odds with its genre. Here she is far more personal, more direct. She now has the confidence to allow her life and presence to assume greater narrative weight, whether she's evoking a punked-out adolescence, recalling a small shocking encounter with her father or even describing the mind-cleansing pleasures of a long drive, of "roads whose mesas and diners were always the same and whose light and clouds and weather never were." And as this passage suggests, Solnit's prose here glistens like a snake with a new skin. In her earlier work you hardly ever noticed a sentence. Now her language demands a different level of attention, as though it were trying to achieve a new adequacy to the physical world it describes. Her style is not as mannered or as memorable as that of Joan Didion, and because of that her version of California may never gain the traction it deserves. Yet it is every bit as suggestive.

Solnit once wrote that she aspires to the kind of work called "hybrid," in which "public life spills over into personal anecdote, emotion evolves into analysis," a form of writing that takes its inspiration from the meander and flow of conversation. In this book she compares the writing of fiction and expository prose, and she notes, "In essays, ideas are the protagonists, and they often develop much like characters." She has an enviable ability to transform those ideas into the vehicles of narrative, and her own work resembles a richly conceived character, capable of sudden turns and sharp twists, changing direction from book to book and page to page in ways that, in retrospect, are nevertheless consistent with what she's done before. A Field Guide to Getting Lost makes only a modest claim. Yet it has something close to perfect pitch, an intermezzo in an increasingly impressive career.

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