Presented by Wellfleet Public Library as part of Climate Preparedness Week.
WARMTH is a new kind of book about climate change: not what it is or how we solve it, but the emotional terrain of the crisis, and how it feels to imagine a future—and a family—under its weight. In a fiercely personal account written from inside the climate movement, Sherrell lays bare how the crisis is transforming our relationships to time, to hope, and to each other. At once a memoir, a love letter, and an electric work of criticism, WARMTH goes to the heart of the defining question of our time: how do we go on in a world that may not. Beginning in New York City after Hurricane Sandy, amid the battle to pass some of the country’s most progressive climate legislation, and then branching outward to jazz funerals in post-Katrina New Orleans and Aboriginal songline walks along the Australian coast, this debut follows Sherrell as he narrates a letter to a hypothetical child that he hasn’t yet decided to bring into this fraught world. Written by and for a new generation, WARMTH lays bare what it’s like to grapple with the crisis for the millennials that grew up in its shadow, laying bare the feelings of numbness, grief, ambivalence, and resolve that we will all must confront this overheating century. In deft, lyrical prose, Sherrell reminds us that we are not alone in our anxieties, even as he refuses to look away from the severity of the crisis. Drawing on his talents as a writer and his experience as an activist, he offers a deeply felt and urgently needed account of the struggle to make meaning on a planet coming undone.
