Harvey. Maria. Irma. Sandy. Katrina. We live in a time of unprecedented hurricanes and catastrophic weather events, a time when it is increasingly clear that climate change is neither imagined nor distant―and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways.
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.
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.
