From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire

by Sarah Jaffe

Overview

From a social critic and journalist, a poignant book that encourages publicly grieving what we've lost in order to move towards a hopeful future.

Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning the futures that are being so brutally curtailed. At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a radical act. 

Through in-depth reporting intertwined with memoir, Sarah Jaffe shows how public memorialization has become more than a refusal or a protest: it is a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to mourn the lives, the homes, and the worlds we have lost, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541703490
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	09/10/2024
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Sarah Jaffe is a Type Media Center Fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. She is the author of Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the American Prospect, and many other publications. She is the cohost, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine's Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

Editorial Reviews

"[A] passionately felt study of global protest movements… A writer of great curiosity and emotional honesty, Jaffe tackles the waves of dissent that erupted in the second decade of this century and, in some cases, simmer along today." —Times Literary Supplement (UK)

“Detailed, lucid and richly sourced, Sarah Jaffe’s From the Ashes shows how the transformational power of grief can fuel revolutionary change.”—BookPage (starred review)

“One of the hardest but most necessary things is to write our lives and the larger world together at the same time. In a book of wrenching honesty, Sarah Jaffe does just this, giving us a snapshot of what it means to think and feel politically in our present perilous moment.” —Quinn Slobodian, author of Crack-Up Capitalism

“Undone by grief in the wake of her father’s death, Jaffe investigates how shared vulnerability from loss can challenge, fuel, and transform movements for social change. Her rich reporting from the frontlines underscores how essential it is for activists and organizers to reckon with what it means to mourn—and shows how courageously confronting loss can help us build the solidarity our world so urgently needs.” —Sara Marcus, author of Political Disappointment

“ From the Ashes . . . delivers in the most satisfying way. A profound analysis of grief, state violence, migration, labor, climate catastrophe, and mutual aid, From the Ashes transformed my understanding of each. With jarring and revelatory precision, Jaffe renames our collective grief, recognizes its political origins, and introduces us to the  people who are turning grief into revolution.” —Chenjerai Kumanyika, Peabody Award–winning host of Uncivil and Seeing White

"Jaffe delivers a searching meditation on grief and its misapprehensions… A fresh way to look at the psychic pains that we bear mostly alone—and unnecessarily so."

—Kirkus

From the Publisher

2024-07-10
Labor journalist Jaffe delivers a searching meditation on grief and its misapprehensions.

The world is burning—literally, with climate change remaking the planet and pandemics and political violence upending the nations. Against this backdrop, Jaffe posits, her private griefs are not lessened, but they stand in a kind of communion with the grief experienced by so many others: grief born of the death of loved ones, of injustice, of the need to leave one’s country and flee to another. Such griefs, Jaffe writes, constitute “a sudden, abrupt, even violent break from the status quo”—and if there’s anything capitalism hates, it’s a departure from the status quo and the demands that owners make on the worker bees’ lives, without time allotted for grieving but “only to attend a funeral.” Though her musings never quite cohere into a manifesto as such, Jaffe’s book constitutes an informal set of philosophical propositions: Capitalism wants us to be monads, easily separable, in a society that “hasn’t been set up to understand collective decisions”; because grief is universal, it is definitively collective; therefore, as one therapist tells her, “We’re communal beings. We should be heartbroken for each other.” Whether that sense of broadly distributed grief can do anything to lessen individual sufferings is a point of debate, but certainly it invites the reader to summon more empathy upon learning of the death of a friend’s pet, the loss of a job, the failure of a marriage. All of this hinges on a perhaps unexpected outgrowth of grief, namely hope in the form of the realization that we have no control over the world—but, even so, “changing the world is a process that will require many of us imagining and struggling together.”

A fresh way to look at the psychic pains that we bear mostly alone—and unnecessarily so.

Kirkus Reviews