LESSONS FOR SURVIVAL

Bearing witness to a time of crisis.

American Book Award–winner Raboteau responds to the turbulence of the past decade in 20 essays on issues that deeply affect her life: Black motherhood, racial inequality, climate change, her beloved father’s death, and the experience and effects of the global pandemic. Searching for “lessons for survival” in perilous times, she roamed New York, where she found solace in birds—some real, others depicted in murals throughout the city—that lifted her spirits “when it felt like the world was closing in.” Beset by anxiety over climate change, she traveled to Palestinian villages, where land and resources are overseen and controlled by the Israeli military; there, in the unforgiving desert, she hoped to learn how inhabitants manage their lives. In a coastal Alaskan village, she accompanied an atmospheric scientist to assess the effects of climate change in a delta basin that “is one of the fastest-warming parts of the planet.” Environmental issues are not the author’s only source of worry: Raising two boys, she is viscerally aware of racial injustice. Besides having “the talk” about how to protect themselves from the police, she needs “to prepare them for extreme heat and ungodly flooding.” Drawing similarities between climate crises that victimize people of color more severely than whites and her grandmother’s experience of fleeing the Jim Crow South, Raboteau sees her family as vulnerable to “a different hazard to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”: “the rising sea.” Her own gesture for combatting unjust policy is “to talk about it among friends and family—to make private anxieties public concerns,” as she does in these essays. “Climate grief and coronavirus grief feel strikingly parallel,” Raboteau writes. “The solutions to both problems rely on collective action and political will.” The book includes the author’s photos.

A thoughtful collection with an urgent message.