She skillfully interweaves observations by friends, scholars and literary figures like Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison with grim climate data and social science findings ... While Raboteau grapples with much that is wrong with our troubled world, she does so with bracing honesty and insight. The strength of her book is her willingness to express concerns that many feel but are reluctant to voice.
Ms. Raboteau doesn’t take the obvious route. She doesn’t delve into the coming water wars of the Western U.S. or spend time discussing carbon taxes or deforestation. The writing shines, instead, in the personal and cultural nuance, and the way they are inevitably intertwined with climate change and its inequality…She described her grandmother Mabel, who was forced to flee with her children from the Jim Crow south, in passages so delicate they seemed to float.
Reading Lessons for Survival can be disheartening. Robateau’s catalog of the urban woes she and her family face is grim. In one of the essays, she reports on a visit she made to a poor Palestinian village in the West Bank whose water supply is severely curtailed by the Israelis. She wonders why the villagers don’t simply leave. She asks the same question of herself. She and her husband are career professionals with options. Yet they remain in their inhospitable environment. Why? The answer comes in the final essay, as Robateau and her family move into the rundown house in the Bronx they have purchased with all their savings and renovated. She is determined to be resilient, to survive.
