Recipes for hope.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew

The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear Edited by Paul Rogat Loeb Basic Books. 384 pages. $15.95.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit Nation Books. 150 pages. $12.95.

In the weeks leading up to the November election, I thought I was being clever. Whenever I was giving a speech, I joked that if John Kerry didn't win, then psychiatrists and psychologists better clear their calendars for the walk-ins. It wasn't very funny. People, in their grief, did besiege their counselors after November 2.

That grief, that pang of defeat, was similar to one that overwhelmed people when Bush launched his reckless Iraq War. Just a month before, millions of people the world over protested in the greatest simultaneous peace rally ever held, kindling the possibility that the war could be stopped before it even started.

But when Bush plunged in anyway, many people grew dejected.

And now, as Bush plots even more wars and as he schemes to undermine Social Security and return the United States to an era of primitive capitalism, I hear over and over again the anguished cries of fatigue and defeat.

So I picked up these two books on hope. And I found a lot of wisdom here. The authors don't offer Hallmark cheer or fortune cookie luck. Instead, they serve up homemade nuggets of inspiration and the recipes of hope from some of the best chefs we have.

The writer Rebecca Solnit, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for River of Shadows, makes a compelling case in Hope in the Dark. First, she demands some historical perspective and chides those of us who (like Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, she told me recently) go around complaining about how terrible things are right now.

By dwelling on the negative, people fail to "recognize what a radically transformed world we live in," she writes. She rattles off some of the signposts of social change: the end of Jim Crow, the blooming of the women's movement, gay liberation, ecological awareness, the fall of the Soviet empire, the demise of apartheid, the Zapatista uprising, and the fight for global justice.

She rightly excoriates some radicals who "conceive of the truth as pure bad news, appoint themselves the deliverers of it, and keep telling it over and over." This habit is macho and Puritanical, she writes.

It also distorts reality. Yes, democracy is in trouble in the United States right now, she writes, "but it's also true that it's...