Warmth

fell asleep in the grass, and when I woke up the temperature had dropped and the picnics dissipated. The few people still out seemed in a hurry to get home. I walked back through the park toward the East Side, past the closing museums, past the expensive boutiques that mimicked the museums, single handbags underlit in glass display cases. Then down the stairs to the train, which I took back to the Bronx. It was only once I stepped into my darkened apartment that I saw the news from Prospect Park, glancing past it on my phone and then scrolling slowly back up, registering what I'd read.

 

What struck me even more than the tragedy-and it did strike me, a slow onset, so that I failed to make dinner that night, and eventually, at a loss for what to do once I finally tore myself from the screen, went to bed without ever having turned on the lights-was how quickly the event, this flicker of violence, was subsumed once more into the general mill of the park. Was forgotten, essentially. Beyond the cordon of police tape, the newspapers reported, the barbecues continued as normal, the corporate kickball games resumed. Participants in a charity walk strode industriously by in matching purple T-shirts, which predicted, in cursive quotes, that an end to pancreatic cancer was at hand. Wage Hope, the shirts read. The moment had rolled on, in other words. And I'm only being partially rhetorical when I ask you: What else could it have possibly done?

 

Afterward, I felt irrationally like I should have been able to detect some ripple when it happened, a subtle shock wave passing from his park to mine, like a bell tolled to part one hour from the next. Undoubtedly the news alerts had been piling up in my pocket, but I'd set my phone on silent and so hadn't felt even those regular vibrations I'd grown accustomed to associating with tragedy. While the man burned-the flames carbonizing his skin, then evaporating his blood-I hadn't felt a thing. It had been a beautiful day

ecocriticism . . . refreshingly different . . . an avowedly future-orientated work that revives climate writing. The Hedgehog Review

Warmth shows us a new way to tell the story of how we might cope and survive a future of catastrophe. The Nation

[Warmth] provides insight on how to navigate a world threatened by climate change from the overwhelming anxiety it conjures to the existential quandary it wreaks. The Cut

[Warmth] is a blueprint [...] for learning how a person might gain clarity on a phenomenon that is so ever-present that it is almost invisible until the waves are at your door . . . [Sherrell] lay[s] out the hypocrisy and the numbness and the despair and the hope and the uncertainty and the culpability all the mess of trying to live simultaneously within and outside of the Problem and ask[s] an altogether new question: What now? Warmth is delicate at times, brutal at others, but it is always thoughtfully rendered, and often beautifully so. The Colorado Review

Sherrell brilliantly balances despair and hope in his searing debut . . . [with] nuanced reflections on how a caring and thoughtful person should respond to climate change . . . This indelible, necessary work makes a global issue deeply personal. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

[An] eerie and gorgeous book . . . [Warmth] 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. Booklist (starred review)

[Sherrell] writes with clarity and emotion . . . a compelling, urgent work . . . 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. Library Journal (starred review)

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 . . . Warmth is a pleading, informative call to action. BookPage

Insightful reflections from a thoughtful, energetic activist. Kirkus Reviews

Sherrell's strikingly perceptive book is neither a prescription for hope or for despair, but a call for a clear-eyed examination of one of the most pressing questions of our time what do we owe the next generation? Jenny Offill, New York Times bestselling author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation

Beautifully rendered and bracingly honest, this book helped me do the impossible: live in the space between grief and hope. Jenny Odell, New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing

Searchingly honest, this fine book is the work of someone actively engaged in the most important fight of our time (maybe of all time), and also of a writer able to establish the necessary distance. Dan Sherrell is smart, obviously, but he's also something much more important: open, vulnerable, able to face fully that which we all must grapple with in this overheating century. Bill McKibben, New York Times bestselling author of Falter

In this insider account of the struggle for the earth against the forces of corporate greed that threaten it, Daniel Sherrell has written a tender letter to the uncertain future at once intimate and angry, exasperated and brave. Anne Boyer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Undying

Warmth is a moving, beautifully written memoir of an activist's coming-of-age in this era of climate disruption. It is also a powerful and profound meditation on writing, language and story-telling, and their relationship to politics and activism. Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Little has been written that so vividly captures what it is like to be young and so-very-much alive in the wealthiest nation in the world as it comes undone. Daniel Sherrell s Warmth is a groundbreaking work that illustrates how to fight emotionally, intellectually, physically, with all one s might for a future worth inhabiting. Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

Wow . . . This book blew my heart open. Franny Choi, author of Soft Science (via Instagram)

An urgent cri de coeur from a passionate and clear-eyed new talent. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of The Ministry for the Future

[Warmth] speaks powerfully to all generations . . . Impassioned, conflicted, dogged, poetic, hugely intelligent, Warmth is a personal meditation on how to act and grieve at the same time, how to keep faith and fight for the future as you watch it disappear. Kim Mahood, author of Position Doubtful

By speaking directly to the future [...] Sherrell manages the neat trick of imagining how we might get there with our wits and hopes intact. Peter Friederici, author of Beyond Climate Breakdown