The title of this excellent collection of essays is a metaphor for one of its running themes: so-called revolutions tend to be incremental, rather than entirely unexpected one-off events. Nobody can see accurately into the future; when we look back at historical improvements in people’s lives “around gender, nature, race, and the rest”, most were equally unseeable beforehand, even though they might now seem (wrongly) to have been almost inevitable. There is cause for neither optimism nor pessimism about what the future might hold; the best we can do is continue to work towards what we want to achieve and hope things will turn out for the better—even though it’s unlikely they will turn out exactly how we envisage. Although the road ahead might not be clear or straight, keep taking steps in the right general direction and, occasional setbacks notwithstanding, we can hope eventually to help make a better world.
Despite my occasionally tendency towards cynicism, I found myself liking this line of reasoning a lot: the future is not preordained, so there’s no excuse for not trying to improve the world in your own way.
No Straight Road Takes You There is a surprisingly positive book to be enjoyed in a surprisingly negative time.
(On a personal aside, I was delighted to discover the first essay in this collection was one I’d previously read on the Guardian website and had enjoyed so much that I’d written an enthusiastic post about it.)
- Buy this book from Bookshop.org (UK) and help tax-paying, independent bookshops.
- Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk
- Buy this book from Amazon.com
