On Sale 3/12/24

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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 stitches together multiple stories of protection, offering a profound sense of hope.

Advance Praise

"Emily Raboteau is both seeker and sage. In Lessons for Survival, she dedicates her considerable intellectual gifts and her incredible gift for language and storytelling to a confrontation with the catastrophes and losses of our era. From climate crisis to border patrols, and from Alzheimer’s to shots fired in the backs of innocents, Raboteau maintains searing clarity and moral courage. She traverses generations and geographies, all the while caring for her children, and in so doing Raboteau teaches us that to “mother” is to tend, to study, to nurture, and to hand over our most precious inheritances." —Imani Perry, author of South to America

"As the world burns, Emily Raboteau is paying attention as a mother, as a writer and as a pilgrim in search of beauty and justice. At a time when the disconnect between the violence and inequities surrounding race and the climate crisis is too often unseen and ignored, Raboteau makes this relationship clear through her moving inquiries and observations. Lessons for Survival has wings. This beautiful, soaring book is its own pilgrimage and prayer. —Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge

“Emily Raboteau made me quake at what the obliteration of environment necessarily does to, and with, our body's ancestry. Raboteau's vision and pen pan out as lusciously as they pan in here. And what is left in the folds is utterly devastating and as layered and magnificent as essayistic-writing gets. Lessons for Survival is the height of what an essay collection can do, and be." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

"If Lessons for Survival is a quilt—as Emily Raboteau calls this glorious and rigorous collection of essays, full of salve and salvage—then its squares are eloquent windows onto an infinite and imperiled world, from birds bathing in a Bronx pond to softening Permafrost on the Yukon peninsula; from protest chants to floors of lava. These essays offer a kid’s eye view, a bird’s eye view, a dog’s eye view and a bike’s eye view, views from jungle gyms and floodplains, from noisy dinner tables and daily quarantines. They are stitched with Raboteau’s particular poetry of the playground—which is to say, lyrics of the mundane and unremarkable, animated by the urgencies of intimacy and care and witnessing. The panels of this quilt are cut from vast swaths of grief and joy, and the beauty of this book is not a distraction from crisis but a call to see its stakes more clearly: to celebrate and protect what we are fighting for." —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

"Never have I needed a book as badly as I needed Lessons for Survival.There is so much talk these days about raising resourceful, resilient children. But what does that mean and how does one do it without going to pieces entirely? Or perhaps, more pointedly, what new worlds can be assembled from the wreckage of the one that is (always) ending all around us? Emily Raboteau fearlessly addresses these questions in her brillant, lambent new essay collection. Lessons in Survival will carry you through this unsettling moment and the many more that lie ahead." —Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening

"Spanning half the globe, from the Arctic to Palestine to Harlem and the Bronx, Emily Raboteau’s Lessons for Survival is exactly the kind of book we need right now: one that models how to carry the unprecedented environmental urgency of the present moment in our bodies and our actions and our minds. I am so grateful for this book — its beauty and clarity and wisdom — in these uncertain times." —Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings