Lessons for Survival

Mothering Against “the Apocalypse”

By: Emily Raboteau

Narrated by: Emily Raboteau

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.

A Book for Our Time

Lessons for Survival is beautifully written. The perfect balance between the personal and the political, or rather current moment as stewards of our planet and fellow travelers of the vulnerable among us, Emily Raboteau has successfully provided us with the subjects and questions we need to go forward in our world.

Precision naming from birds to people to plants.

It was almost endless with the details clouding the vision leaving me compelled without knowing why. Rewrite it.