Taking its cue from Gramsci's line that "the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters," Rebecca Solnit maps what she sees as an extraordinary revolution of ideas and rights over the past half century. Solnit, one of the most widely read essayists of her generation, argues that a profound shift has been underway—a growing recognition of the interdependent and symbiotic relationships that bind humans to one another and to the natural world. That recognition, she contends, is beginning to erode the old certainties of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and human domination of nature, even as the defenders of the old order fight fiercely to reverse it. Drawing on decades of activism and essay writing, Solnit resists both triumphalism and despair. Her aim is to show how much has genuinely changed within living memory, and to insist that the direction of that change is neither inevitable nor complete. The book is short and distilled, closer to a manifesto than to her longer works of cultural history, and it gathers themes that run through much of her writing: the unpredictability of political change, the importance of hope as a discipline rather than an emotion, and the power of collective action. Written in a moment of reaction and backlash, The Beginning Comes After the End is Solnit's argument that the power to remake the world remains within reach, and that the reader's task is to recognize the transformation already in motion and carry it forward.