Lessons for Survival
Emily Raboteau writes these essays as a mother in New York City trying to keep her children safe and hopeful in a time of overlapping crises. With a camera in hand, she searches out birds and bird murals across the city, hunts for parks where her kids can play away from pollution and police, and travels to learn from Indigenous communities about resilience. The pieces move between the personal and the planetary, linking the climate emergency to questions of race, motherhood, and care. Raboteau writes with clarity and moral weight, building a book that reads like a quilt of windows onto a fragile, imperiled world and the work of surviving it together.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Lessons for Survival
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A collection of essays in which a Black mother tries to raise her children to thrive amid climate change, racism, and the other crises of the moment.
Yes. Roxane Gay chose it as the April 2024 pick for The Audacious Book Club.
Lessons for Survival was written by Emily Raboteau, published in 2024 by Henry Holt and Co..
Lessons for Survival is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Lessons for Survival takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Lessons for Survival is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.