Award-winning author and critic Emily Raboteau crafts 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 city parks where her children may safely play while avoiding pollution, pandemics, and the police. She ventures abroad to learn from Indigenous peoples, and in her own family and community, she discovers the most intimate examples of resilience. Raboteau bears witness to the inner life of Black womanhood, motherhood, 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.

BIO

Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her books include Searching for Zion (2013), winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the cult classic novel, The Professor’s Daughter (2005). Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s essays have appeared and been anthologized in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, Best American Science Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Her distinctions include an inaugural Climate Narratives Prize from Arizona State University, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists’ New York chapter, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and Yaddo. She serves regularly as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem, once known as “the poor man’s Harvard.” She lives in the Bronx with her husband, the novelist Victor LaValle, and their two children.

REVIEWS

Finalist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
One of Time’s “100 Must-Read Books of 2024”
One of ELLE Magazines’ Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
One of Electric Literature’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2024
Named one of The New York Times’ “15 New Books to Read in March”
Named one of the Los Angeles Times’ Books to Ease Climate Anxiety
One of the Los Angeles Times’ “10 Books to Add to Your Reading List in March”
One of Vulture’s Book Highlights of 2024
Named one of Science Friday’s “Best Science Beach Reads For Summer 2024”
Named one of Electric Literature’s “75 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2024”
Named one of Heatmap’s “17 Climate Books to Read in 2024”
Named one of Lancaster Online’s Summer Books

“A soulful exploration of the fraught experience of caretaking through crisis. . . . While Raboteau grapples with much that is wrong with our troubled world, she does so with bracing honesty and insight. The strength of her book is her willingness to express concerns that many feel but are reluctant to voice.” -- Tiya Miles, The New York Times Book Review

“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.” -- Lorraine Berry, Los Angeles Times

[H]  Henry Holt & Company  /  March 12, 2024

0.83" H x 8.89" L x 6.12" W (0.82 lbs) 304 pages

[P]  Holt Paperbacks /  March 11, 2025

0.83" H x 8.89" L x 6.12" W (0.82 lbs) 304 pages