This is a book about language, first and foremost, a literary approach to a real-world problem. So while facts and figures do find their way in, conveying how fast the waters will rise or how far the sea may ultimately intrude, they are not the main focus ... Rush captures nature with precise words that almost amount to poetry; the book is further enriched with illuminating detail from the lives of those people inhabiting today’s coasts ... The dispatches of the subtitle really come straight from the people on the front lines of this drowning ... To me, these are the most intense portions of the book, yet there is no character, not even Rush herself, to guide you through the whole of this story. Nor is there really a plot to follow, not even a chronology that points the way through a series of essays veering from haunting survivors’ tales to poetic musings on science. It’s an intentional series of vignettes, however, bolstered by deep reporting and a sense of history, reminiscent in part of W. G. Sebald’s works evoking place, even up to including photographs, like the pictures of rampikes that mark various chapters. It’s often a treat to figure out where Rush is going with any particular story ... Elegies like this one will play an important role as people continue to confront a transformed, perhaps unnatural world, and grieve for the doomed or already lost.

Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore is a revelation ... Their stories, told through a combination of lyrical reportage and first-person accounts from her subjects, coalesce into a moving and urgent portrait ... Rising is a clarion call.

In her lyrical and fact-packed investigative effort, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Elizabeth Rush successfully attempts to bridge the gap between the scientific and a terrifying aesthetic ... Climate change literature is notoriously dry and pessimistic. Rush does her best to avoid these pitfalls by weaving data into personal tales that don’t shy away from doubts ... This honest vulnerability is Rush’s best narrative approach ... The author’s largely successful lyrical approach to environmental writing is complemented by the structure of her storytelling ... Rush’s effort to make scientific journalism digestible is also at times bogged down by esoteric language that might inadvertently distance the reader ... Rush makes her writing part of the reader’s journey to actively seek out the unfamiliar.

... an elegiac environmental justice–oriented meditation on sea level rise .... Troubled by...inequities, Rush reveals why and where the sea is rising, who in our nation is affected, and what we might democratically do about it. She excels at redrawing our blurring edges—showing, for example, how the state of Louisiana no longer resembles a boot now that its sole is deteriorating ... Rising is an assemblage of vignettes: interviews with scientists, cautionary photographs of coastal ghost trees killed at the root by salinity, first-person testimonials by folks living in threatened wetlands, and accounts of the author’s travels to transforming shoreline communities ... Rising is also a treatise on language. Take the term resilient, which we apply to both people and the environment to describe strength. Rush glosses the word, considering how its meaning varies for people depending where on the shifting shore they stand ... 'Real resiliency might mean letting go of our image of the coastline, learning to leave the very places we have long considered necessary to our survival,' Rush writes ... Rush focuses on the strategy of community-driven resettlement with government support. It is, she argues, the only approach with the appropriate humility and acknowledgment of the scale of the threat.

Reading her book is like learning ecology at the feet of a poet rather than a scientist ... An empathetic writer and observer, Rush hints that she is learning alongside you ... Rush’s literary framing does not always succeed. Her detours into memoir, though brief, can be distracting rather than enlightening ... Nonetheless, this is a lovely and thoughtful book, so lyrical that you forget how much science it delivers.

...science, poetry and personal witness, concerned with human and more-than-human communities ... Appealingly, Rush puts her research and writing to work alongside the perspectives of coastal residents: interwoven chapters are told in other voices ... Rising is in some ways a difficult read. Its subjects are sobering and saddening ... Rising has more to offer: pulsing, gleaming prose and a stubborn search for, if not hope, then peace in the face of disaster.

... marshals scientific, intellectual, literary, and journalistic resources to document how climate change has impacted our world on multiple levels. [Rush's] book is a very honest appraisal of both the changes we have wrought and the challenges that we and our children must face ... examin[es] climate change with nimble and expressive prose ... Rush inserts herself bravely and honestly into her narrative...she is not afraid or hesitant to make human connections with the subjects of her writing ... The great benefit of Rush’s work is in bringing climate change to our back door ... Her narrative argument is clear but powerful: climate change is omnipresent, unavoidable, and right here ... Rush’s journey of discovery has taken an emotional toll on her, and her book bears the scars of her quest, which makes her writing more intimate, more direct, and ultimately more impactful.

...the most interesting parts of Rising come when we catch glimpses of people who live by the sea contending with how hard retreating actually is ... The book’s standout moments come when Rush’s subjects get a chance to speak for themselves, but Rush herself proves to be a distracting narrator, especially in the moments when she showily checks her privilege ... For all of Rising’s merits, I came away feeling like it was an exceedingly elegantly worded harangue, bent on exposing our hypocrisies and shot through with a subtle but off-putting undercurrent of contempt for those who disagree with its author. Rush’s argument for retreat is a sound one, but the book brooks no other alternatives. And Rising’s overbearing lyricism ... takes not-so-subtle potshots at any attempt to engineer solutions to the problems sea level rise causes. But I can’t help thinking that for an issue as complex as climate change and one as deeply individual as deciding where to call home, we need all the ideas we can get.

[Rush] attaches her climate expertise to the sociological, the historic and the personal to craft a unique hybrid. Between the pages of Rising she achieves this with an exacting and poetic certitude ... Rush’s spare and evocative style evokes a sense of mourning and infuses the sometimes dense scientific material with a fearsome inevitability. She reaches always for context and larger meaning.

Timely and urgent ... Rush also presents a legible overview of scientific understandings of climate change and the options for combating it. In the midst of a highly politicized debate on climate change and how to deal with its far-reaching effects, this book deserves to be read by all.