Publisher Description
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 readers 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.
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About Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau is
the author of a novel, The Professor’s
Daughter, and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion. Her fiction and essays have been widely
published and anthologized in Best
American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Tin House, The
Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, The Believer, and elsewhere.
Honors received include a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago
Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award and fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. An
avid world traveler, Raboteau resides in New York City where she teaches
creative writing at City College, in Harlem.