The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

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An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: Thwaites Glacier. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans, and believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise.

In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublimeseeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaitesalongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. A ping-pong tournament at sea. Long hours in the lab. All the effort that goes into caring for and protecting human life in a place that is inhospitable to it. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change

What emerges is a new kind of Antarctica story, one preoccupied not with flag planting but with the collective and challenging work of imagining a better future. With understanding the language of a continent where humans have only been present for two centuries. With the contributions and concerns of women, who were largely excluded from voyages until the last few decades, and of crew members of color, whose labor has often gone unrecognized.The Quickening teems with their voiceswith the colorful stories and personalities of Rushs shipmatesin a thrilling chorus.

Urgent and brave, absorbing and vulnerable, The Quickeningis another essential book from Elizabeth Rush.

Reviews

Praise for The Quickening

The fascinating inside story of climate science at the edge of Antarctica [. . .] In this follow-up toRising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, Rush shows us how data collection happens, capturing the intriguing details of climate science in the field [. . .] The scientists are not the only heroes of Rushs book, which emphasizes above all the collaborative and interdependent nature of such voyages, where so much depends on the staff and crew. In addition to her own poetic voice, the author incorporates the voices of everyone on the ship, highlighting women and racial and ethnic minorities, who have been overlooked in the canon of Antarctic literature.Kirkus Reviews

The Quickeningis the Antarctic book I've been waiting foranimmersive modern day expedition tale,areflection on science and knowledge-making,aconfrontation with gendered histories,anda brilliant writer's spellbinding meditation on human mistakes, distant goals, and courage.Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning: A Novel

The Quickeningis about the end of a great glacier and the beginning of a small life. It is a book about imagining the future, and it is a book of hope.Elizabeth Kolbert,author ofUnder a White Sky

Going to the Antarctic is an adventure, big science is an adventure, having a child is an adventureand all of these adventurers are shaded by the great and tragic adventure of our time, the plunge into an ever-warmer world. So, this is an adventure story for the ages!Bill McKibben, author ofThe End of Nature

One of the most insightful expeditions I have read in quite some time. Not only does Elizabeth Rush sail into the Southern Ocean and Antarctica, but she also elegantly navigates the difficult questions of meaning and purpose that hold together the center of our communities and selves. Rushs narration is one that will find an audience of questioners and explorers, both of the world and the soul, for years to come.Emerson Sistare, Toadstool Bookstore, Keene, NH

Ranging from glaciers to what grows within, this journey to Antarctica is like none youve read beforedelightful and devastating, profound and grounded, but most of all shimmering with life. The Quickening is a mesmerizing ode to the power of melting ice and the necessity of creation amid world-altering change. I cried and laughed from cover to cover. Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush offers readers a symphony of voices from the people who stand at the forefront of climate investigations, woven with the singular lyrical story about a womans embodied hope for the future. On a ship bound for the uncharted edge of the fragile Thwaites Glacier, experience an Antarctic voyage youve never heard before, about a warming world breaking apart, even as new life begins. Meera Subramanian, author of A River Runs Again: Indias Natural World in Crisis, from the Barren Cliffs of Rajasthan to the Farmlands of Karnataka

Praise for Rising

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD
A CHICAGO TRIBUNE TOP TEN BOOK OF 2018
A GUARDIAN, NPRs SCIENCE FRIDAY, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, AND LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2018

A rigorously reported story about American vulnerability to rising seas, particularly disenfranchised people with limited access to the tools of rebuilding.Jury Citation, Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

Deeply felt . . . 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 todays coasts. . . . Elegies like this one will play an important role as people continue to confront a transformed, perhaps unnatural world.New York Times

The book on climate change and sea levels that was missing. Rush travels from vanishing shorelines in New England to hurting fishing communities to retracting islands and, with empathy and elegance, conveys what it means to lose a world in slow motion. Picture the working-class empathy of Studs Terkel paired with the heartbreak of a poet.Chicago Tribune (Best Ten Books of 2018)

Sea level rise is not some distant problem in a distant place. AsRush shows, its affecting real people right now.Risingis a compelling piece of reporting, by turns bleak and beautiful.Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

A smart, lyrical testament to change and uncertainty. Rush listens to both the vulnerability and resiliency of communities facing the shifting shorelines of extreme weather.These are the stories we need to hear in order to survive and live more consciously with a sharp-edged determination to face our future with empathy and resolve. Rising illustrates how climate change is a relentless truth and how real people in real places know it by name, storm by flood by fire.Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion

Lovely and thoughtful . . . Reading [Rushs]book is like learning ecology at the feet of a poet.Minneapolis Star Tribune
With tasteful and dynamic didactic language, [Rush] informs the layperson about the imminent threat of climate change while grounding the massive scope of the problem on heartfelt human and interspecies connection.Los Angeles Review of Books
Moving and urgent . . . RushsRisingis a revelation. . . . The project ofRising, like the project of Matthew Desmonds Pulitzer Prize-winningEvicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, is to draw attention to ongoing material crisis through the stories of the people who are surviving within it.Risingis a clarion call. The idea isnt merely that climate change is here and scary. Theres a more important message: There are people out here who need help.Pacific Standard

A sobering, elegant look at rising waters, climate change, and how low lying areas and the vulnerable people who live in those areas are at risk.Roxane Gay, author of Hunger, via Goodreads

Rushs innovative, brave Rising [is] about the changing coastlines of America in a time of climate breakdown, and part of a growing wave of what might be called Anthropocene non-fiction, seeking to find a form for the challenges of our epoch. . . . [Rising] will stay long with me.Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

Really powerful . . . An exciting book not only because it has these really compelling stories about American climate refugees and people whose lives have already been disrupted by rising seas and other climate catastrophes, but also [Rush is] trying to see if theres a way that creative nonfiction can convey this problem. . . . I had to read it slowly, but I paid close attention, and I felt sort of spiritually nourished by the experience.Claire Vaye Watkins, Los Angeles Review of Books

Timely and urgent, this report on how climate change is affecting American shorelines provides critical evidence of the devastating changes already faced by some coastal dwellers. Rush masterfully presents firsthand accounts of these changes, acknowledging her own privileged position in comparison to most of her interviewees and the heavy responsibility involved in relaying their experiences to an audience. . . . 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.Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Rush traffics only sparingly in doomsday statistics. For Rush, the devastating impact of rising sea levels, especially on vulnerable communities, is more compellingly found in the details. From Louisiana to Staten Island to the Bay Area, Rushs lyrical, deeply reported essays challenge us to accept the uncertainty of our present climate and to consider more just ways of dealing with the immense challenges ahead.The Nation

[Rushs] work does something that other superb science writing on climate change does not: It brings a poetic feeling and personal narrative to the subject. Her warm and informed presence is felt throughout Risinga reminder that now more than ever we need the storytelling skills of nature writers to engage people and change policies given these pressing environmental times.Kathryn Aalto, BuzzFeed (11 Women Who Have Changed the Way We See the Natural World)

In this moving and memorable book, the voice of the author mingles with the voices of people in coastal communities all over the countryMaine, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Florida, New York, Californiato offer testimony:The water is rising. Some have already lost their homes; some will soon; others are studying or watching or grieving. Though they havent met each other, their commonality forms a circle into which we are inexorably pulled by Rushs powerful words.Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

A poetic meditation on the nature of change, on how people can make peace with a changing world and our agency in it . . .Rising[offers] pulsing, gleaming prose and a stubborn search for, if not hope, then peace in the face of disaster.Shelf Awareness

The strength of [Rising] lies not only in the pulse and momentum of her prose but in the relationships she built while writing it: relationships with scientists and with the many people whose homes are already underwater. Rush is an unusually courageous individual, and the book reverbera

Author Bio

Elizabeth Rushis the author ofThe Quickening:Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth;Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; andStill Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in theNew York Times, Harpers, Orion, Granta, Guernica, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and the Metcalf Institute, Rush lives with her husband and son in Rhode Island, where she teaches at Brown University.