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A review by ostrowk
Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World by Daniel Sherrell
5.0
WARMTH is one of the best books I've ever read, able to articulate all of what I've felt "coming of age at the end of our world" — and infinitely more, given that Sherrell's a brilliant climate organizer who's thought deeply about the collapsible tensions between feeling and strategy, then and now, knowledge and realization.
In WARMTH, Sherrell is unselfconsciously earnest and vulnerable in his grappling with what he calls the Problem, a many-sided "hyperobject" he's trying to move from his "brain down into [his] bones" (253). For him, "the chief ethical and political challenge presented by life in the Anthropocence" is to "finally match our obvious and increasing interdependence with an appropriate breadth of care" (80). WARMTH is a clarion call of care, a letter from a father to his unborn child, an absolute "pouring forth" of love and insight (249).
Miraculously, Sherrell's also a musician on the page. Here's a more or less random paragraph, plucked from the middle of an early chapter: "This questioning is far from new. Millions of people before me have had to consider the prospect of a child in a context made hostile by the Dream. They've done this from plantations and refugee camps, reservations and war zones—places far more devastating and dangerous than anywhere I've ever been; places where a world was ending or had ended. And though it may have felt hopeless and reckless and futile, sometimes from out of this grappling there came a child. I still cannot fully understand the depth of love it took to do this, to loft a tiny salvo of life into a death as wide as the sky. It amazes me. So too the other choice, the one we hear less about. Those families who chose to truncate their trees rather than see its branches hacked at and burned" (77-78).
WARMTH helped me to fit the hyperobject of the Problem "into [my] heart without it breaking" (246). Read it, mark up its pages, then pass it hand to millennial hand until it buckles under the weight of your attention.
In WARMTH, Sherrell is unselfconsciously earnest and vulnerable in his grappling with what he calls the Problem, a many-sided "hyperobject" he's trying to move from his "brain down into [his] bones" (253). For him, "the chief ethical and political challenge presented by life in the Anthropocence" is to "finally match our obvious and increasing interdependence with an appropriate breadth of care" (80). WARMTH is a clarion call of care, a letter from a father to his unborn child, an absolute "pouring forth" of love and insight (249).
Miraculously, Sherrell's also a musician on the page. Here's a more or less random paragraph, plucked from the middle of an early chapter: "This questioning is far from new. Millions of people before me have had to consider the prospect of a child in a context made hostile by the Dream. They've done this from plantations and refugee camps, reservations and war zones—places far more devastating and dangerous than anywhere I've ever been; places where a world was ending or had ended. And though it may have felt hopeless and reckless and futile, sometimes from out of this grappling there came a child. I still cannot fully understand the depth of love it took to do this, to loft a tiny salvo of life into a death as wide as the sky. It amazes me. So too the other choice, the one we hear less about. Those families who chose to truncate their trees rather than see its branches hacked at and burned" (77-78).
WARMTH helped me to fit the hyperobject of the Problem "into [my] heart without it breaking" (246). Read it, mark up its pages, then pass it hand to millennial hand until it buckles under the weight of your attention.