... bracing ... It’s both inspiring—Sherrell is an immensely talented young writer who cares deeply about his subject—and dispiriting: Sherrell knows this stuff backward and forward, and he isn’t hopeful ... In tone and structure, Warmth resembles James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, ... These are brave books built on an understanding that some battles are worth fighting, some boulders are worth pushing up the hill no matter how many times they come crashing down. Some of the images in Warmth resonate like post-apocalyptic fiction ... Warmth should be required reading for anyone who questions the depth, tenacity, and critical thinking skills of millennials ... an existential yawp, freighted with the ballast of knowledge and intent.
Events are too artless to describe. But emotions have real gravitas. Warmth fluctuates in its emotional tone ... I first found his emotional flipflopping to be jarring and challenging to interpret. But later, I came to think that Sherrell’s diverse emotional palate may in fact reflect the ambivalence most of us feel when it comes to issues of climate change ... For those readers who already know the difference between hoot owls and barn owls, and for those who never knew of their existence, Sherrell awakens a new urgency for reform ... in Warmth, Sherrell makes concrete what is generally too abstract or distant for us to really feel.
Sherrell is a passionate advocate for the climate movement, which he conveys with urgency and honest, raw emotion, expressing an anxiety he feels has infiltrated the essence of his being. He writes with a frightening sense of gravity that will give Generation X and the baby boom generation reason to take a close, hard look at what’s happening and do something ... This is exactly Sherrell’s message. We need to do something—about fossil fuels, corrupt politicians, global food and water security. The list goes on. Warmth is a pleading, informative call to action.
[Sherrell] writes with clarity and emotion about how proximity to tragedy doesn’t ultimately make one privy to it, and suggests that there is a muteness, an ambiguity surrounding so much of the reality we live with, counterbalanced always by the relentless noise of the media. Sherrell has written a compelling, urgent work which will find an eager audience among fans and draw in others interested in environmental justice. This is the type of coming-of-age book one must read in order to understand what it means to live with clear-eyed awareness of the climate disaster while also continuing to move forward ... Brave, honest, and bold, Sherrell’s book is neither blithely optimistic nor fatalistic and instead shows how readers can respond to climate change with circumspection. It should be read alongside the work of climate activists like Greta Thunberg and Jamie Margolin who provide practical models for changing the narrative, even when we know that changes won’t magically engender a happy ending.
... eerie and gorgeous ... This book will validate the fears, grief, and nostalgia that readers of any generation feel about the future of our planet. There is much collective comfort to be found while naming the specifics of such an overwhelming topic, and Sherrell offers that comfort generously on every page.
Climate activist Sherrell brilliantly balances despair and hope in his searing debut ... He also powerfully details the impacts of climate change, notably the devastation wrought by an 'accelerating chain' of storms, including Hurricanes Sandy (2012) and Maria (2017). His framing device, however, allows him to look beyond the grave immediate challenges—exacerbated by the Trump administration’s 'aggressive course of fossil fuel expansion'—to imagine his child alive at 90 in a world that (hopefully) still exists. This indelible, necessary work makes a global issue deeply personal.
Readers reluctant to open another discouraging scientific explanation or call to action may perk up to discover that this is neither ... Rather than delivering a polemic, autobiography, or confessional, Sherrell structures the narrative as a long letter to a hypothetical child that he hasn’t yet decided to bring into this fraught world ... Insightful reflections from a thoughtful, energetic activist.
