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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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WARMTH

Daniel Sherrell

Coming of Age at the End of Our World

From a millennial climate activist comes an exploration of how young people live in the shadow of catastrophe.
WARMTH is a new kind of book about climate change - not a prescription or a polemic, but an intensely personal examination of how it feels to imagine a future under its weight, written from inside the youth-led climate movement itself. It is a critical excavation of the ways we talk about the climate crisis - at the national level, in our communities, and to ourselves - and a memoir of the ongoing struggle to sustain the difficult work of fighting "the Problem".

Though it addresses an issue of global concern, WARMTH arises from a specific time and place: post-Sandy New York. Weaving sit-ins and snowstorms, synagogues and subway tunnels, Daniel Sherrell delves into the questions that feel most urgent to young people at our current crossroads. He explores how we conceptualize the crisis, the ethical implications of having children, our changing relationship with time, and the metaphors that mediate our individual and collective emotional responses - breaking "climate" out of its discursive box in the process. In seeking new ways to understand and respond to these forces that feel so far out of our control, WARMTH lays bare the common stakes we face, and illuminates new sources of faith in our shared humanity.

Daniel Sherrell is a climate organizer who most recently coordinated NY Renews, a coalition of 130 labor unions, environmental organizations, and community groups working to move New York State to 100% renewable energy. His writing has been supported by a Fulbright scholarship in Creative Writing, a residency at Mesa Refuge, the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, and a grant from the Lois Roth Endowment. He is a graduate of Brown University and lives in New York City.
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Published 2021-08-03 by Penguin Trade Paperback Original

Comments

Little has been written that so vividly captures what it is like to be young and so-very-much alive in the wealthiest nation in the world as it comes undone. Daniel Sherrell's Warmth is a groundbreaking work: it shows us how to fight - emotionally, intellectually, physically, with all one's might - for a future worth inhabiting.

Beautifully rendered and bracingly honest, this book helped me do the impossible: live in the space between grief and hope.

Sherrell's strikingly perceptive book is neither a prescription for hope or for despair, but a call for a clear-eyed examination of one of the most pressing questions of our time - what do we owe the next generation?

Searchingly honest, this fine book is the work of someone actively engaged in the most important fight of our time (maybe of all time), and also of a writer able to establish the necessary distance. Dan Sherrell is smart, obviously, but he's something much more important: open, vulnerable, able to face fully that which we all must grapple with in this overheating century.

An urgent cri de coeur from a passionate and clear-eyed new talent.

Written as a letter to the child he imagines he will one day have, [Warmth] speaks powerfully to all generations, alerting us to what it feels like to be a young man working out how to live in an imperilled and warming world. Impassioned, conflicted, dogged, poetic, hugely intelligent, Warmth is a personal meditation on how to act and grieve at the same time, how to keep faith and fight for the future as you watch it disappear. 'To always take heart in what's left, to lavish it recklessly with meaning, to grab grit from the dirt that outlasts us.'

Dutch: Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers

In this insider account of the struggle for the earth against the forces of corporate greed that threaten it, Daniel Sherrell has written a tender letter to the uncertain future - at once intimate and angry, exasperated and brave.