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niniane's review
4.0
It was interesting to learn his perspective and how much he feels this hanging over his life.
His perspective as a young activist who wants to have kids is despairing. Interesting to hear the day by day about the Paris Accords, etc.
His perspective as a young activist who wants to have kids is despairing. Interesting to hear the day by day about the Paris Accords, etc.
dancer4s4's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
3.0
tomrrandall's review
5.0
Sometimes I think, "I could write a book!" and then I read a masterpiece like this from someone younger than me and I decide to stay in my lane.
rigbylove's review
5.0
WOW this warmed me even as it destroyed me with its poetry. I was recommending it before page 100.
jansyn_liberty's review
5.0
If I was smart or capable enough to write a book, this is literally the book I would have written. It is my experience of environmentalism exactly. The author and I are the same age, read the same things in college, had similar post-college forays in environmentalism, and feel deeply similar about climate change (i.e. “the Problem”). I highly recommend this book. Especially to understand a millennial perspective.
nickoftheparty's review
4.0
A nice, necessary meditation on climate change, grief, the decision to have children, and so much more. It definitely meandered from time to time (I question whether certain sections needed to be included at all) and the frame of "letter to my future child" seemed to pivot from being deeply moving to an afterthought throughout. But I found this meaningful, and the ending in particular blew me away.
(Thanks to my friend Kurt — who gets a shoutout in the book — for the suggestion!)
(Thanks to my friend Kurt — who gets a shoutout in the book — for the suggestion!)
egilmore's review
5.0
It took me a long time to finish this, in part because of the heavy subject, but mostly because I didn’t want to lose Sherrell’s company. This is - without a doubt - one of the best books I’ve ever read. Regardless of which generation you were born into: read it.
Sherrell’s mastery of language and sentence composition is absurd. His ability to articulate the daily toll of existentialism that millennials and Gen Z face is uncanny. This is the toll born of an exhausting tension between responsibility and resignation, necessary optimism and realistic cynicism; the desire to live in the present - to live our lives - with the understanding that thinking about the enormity of the future is morally imperative.
Sherrell acknowledges how the intensity of this toll is inextricably linked to intersectionality and environmental racism, as well as the subjection of both young people and the Global South to flooding debt, political gaslighting, poor healthcare, and the ideological paradox of needing to fight capitalism’s wreckage with a dogged capitalist ethic… effecting activist burnout (in all its energy metaphors) and condemning the geographically oppressed to a longview genocide.
Sherrell is heavy on metaphors, and once or twice I felt tired with them. But then the author pointed out… how else to talk about this? All comparisons will fall short, but it seems ontologically impossible to face the issue any more directly.
As it went on, the epistolary premise sometimes felt a little gimmicky and precious. But then Sherrell addressed that reaction, too… how else to position the Problem in a meaningful way, than through imagined intimacy and radical care (in other words, compassion) for the reader and for the future? How else to do so than to write with emotion? As exhausting as it is, sustaining emotion is critical to sustaining reform.
There aren’t solutions here, but sometimes we focus so much on the scramble for solutions we forget to check in with ourselves. Which is to say: it’s terrible - and it’s much more terrible for people who don’t have the privilege many of us do - but it’s not singular. Let that be a balm to the exhaustion we feel thrashing in the nets of anxiety and depression. As Sherrell reminds us, there are plenty of reasons why it’s still worth the fight, and we cannot fight alone.
Sherrell’s mastery of language and sentence composition is absurd. His ability to articulate the daily toll of existentialism that millennials and Gen Z face is uncanny. This is the toll born of an exhausting tension between responsibility and resignation, necessary optimism and realistic cynicism; the desire to live in the present - to live our lives - with the understanding that thinking about the enormity of the future is morally imperative.
Sherrell acknowledges how the intensity of this toll is inextricably linked to intersectionality and environmental racism, as well as the subjection of both young people and the Global South to flooding debt, political gaslighting, poor healthcare, and the ideological paradox of needing to fight capitalism’s wreckage with a dogged capitalist ethic… effecting activist burnout (in all its energy metaphors) and condemning the geographically oppressed to a longview genocide.
Sherrell is heavy on metaphors, and once or twice I felt tired with them. But then the author pointed out… how else to talk about this? All comparisons will fall short, but it seems ontologically impossible to face the issue any more directly.
As it went on, the epistolary premise sometimes felt a little gimmicky and precious. But then Sherrell addressed that reaction, too… how else to position the Problem in a meaningful way, than through imagined intimacy and radical care (in other words, compassion) for the reader and for the future? How else to do so than to write with emotion? As exhausting as it is, sustaining emotion is critical to sustaining reform.
There aren’t solutions here, but sometimes we focus so much on the scramble for solutions we forget to check in with ourselves. Which is to say: it’s terrible - and it’s much more terrible for people who don’t have the privilege many of us do - but it’s not singular. Let that be a balm to the exhaustion we feel thrashing in the nets of anxiety and depression. As Sherrell reminds us, there are plenty of reasons why it’s still worth the fight, and we cannot fight alone.
nielsthewizard's review
4.0
An impressive read on coming of age confronted with the threat of climate crises, with the given information of more problems te come. There were parts I just wanted to rip out and hang them on my wall. Just wow.