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River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit, Viking, $25.95, ISBN 0670031763^* Reviewed by Mike Holderness

YOU would never have heard of Edward Muggeridge if he hadn鈥檛 left sleepy Kingston upon Thames and headed for California in the 1850s. There he reinvented himself as Eadweard Muybridge, and went on to play a major part in fashioning the modern world.

Muybridge is best known as the photographer behind those grainy pictures proving that a galloping horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at once. But in River of Shadows, cultural historian Rebecca Solnit explores his other achievements. He was an accomplished and challenging landscape photographer. While the images of the Yosemite Canyon in California taken by Carleton Watkins in 1861 are pure, stark and bereft of people, Muybridge included settlers, loggers and their shacks and photographed the people they were displacing.

In 1873, he documented the Modoc War, the last stand of those people against the invaders. Some Modoc were inspired by the Ghost Dance, a movement that swept Native America with a belief that the dead were coming back. Photography itself, Solnit suggests, can be a means of bringing back the dead.

Muybridge鈥檚 later work had an even more profound effect on our culture鈥檚 notion of the flow of time. The coming of the railroad 鈥� and yes, Muybridge photographed that too 鈥� had imposed clock time on the world. Muybridge was the first to subdivide it beyond human perception, to show the unseeable.

He did that with his freeze-frame studies of movement in humans and other animals. And that contribution to the invention of cinema helped to make time reversible. Solnit quotes the inventor Thomas Edison, in credit-claiming visionary spate, foreseeing performances by 鈥渁rtists and musicians long since dead鈥�.

It鈥檚 a bit of a shame, then, that Muybridge doesn鈥檛 seem to have photographed his young wife鈥檚 lover before he killed him. A San Francisco jury perversely acquitted him of murder. As the subtitle of this book has it, he inhabited the 鈥渢echnological Wild West鈥�. And that begat Hollywood, the stealer of the world鈥檚 dreams.

Solnit can certainly write. You will forgive her occasional over-writing for the richness of the connections she makes. Read this now, if not earlier.