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Lessons for Survival
- Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”
- Narrated by: Emily Raboteau
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
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Lessons for Survival
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Publisher's Summary
This program is read by the author.
Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau uses the lens of motherhood to craft a powerfully moving meditation on race, climate, environmental justice—and what it takes to find shelter.
Lessons for Survival is a probing series of pilgrimages from the perspective of a mother struggling to raise her children to thrive without coming undone in an era of turbulent intersecting crises.
With camera in hand, Raboteau goes in search of birds, fluttering in the air or painted on buildings, and ways her children may safely play in city parks while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community discovers the most intimate meanings of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black women/motherhood, and to the brutalities and possibilities of cities, while celebrating the beauty and fragility of nature. This innovative work of reportage and autobiography will appeal to fans of the bestseller All We Can Save and Joan Didion’s The White Album alike. Lessons for Survival stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt & Company.
What the critics say
A Most Anticipated Book of the Year, ELLE Magazine
Named one of The New York Times “15 New Books to Read in March”
Named one of the Los Angeles Times “10 Book to Add to Your Reading List in March”
Named one of Vulture's “Best Books of the Year So Far”
Named one of Heatmap's “17 Climate Books to Read in 2024”
Named one of Electric Literature's “75 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2024”
“Interspersing punchy essays with striking photos of bird murals in her Bronx neighborhood, Raboteau chronicles her search for solace as a Black woman and mother in a world awash in political rage and threatened with climate disaster.”—The New York Times
“The question is, how do we push the politicians and corporations to figure out how to save our environment and acknowledge the economic and ecological discrepancies that still plague our culture? I suggest that every single one of them be required to read Lessons for Survival. Even for someone like me, always sympathetic to ecological concerns, it is eye-opening.”—Jane Smiley, The Washington Post
“Raboteau calls our attention to the ways in which environmental pressures will create even more social inequality between those who can afford to move, and those who are rooted by economic necessity and lack of access to alternatives.”—Los Angeles Times