Stephanie Elizondo Griest
For the valiant women of this book, climate change isn’t a theory but a battle waged daily. Douglas Haynes recreates their stories in luminous prose that conveys a deep sense of empathy. An urgent and necessary read.
Paul Bogard
In this soulful book about what it means to exist on the polluted-crowded-dirty-colorful-vibrant-loving margins of a twenty-first-century metropolis, Douglas Haynes clarifies the complex issues affecting families in such cities—at once describing with elegance and insight the world as it is now, and as it increasingly everywhere may be.
Christopher Cokinos
This is a beautifully written, superbly reported book, a necessary exploration of real lives we cannot ignore—not after this important book. The lives in these pages will stay with you and, one hopes, your life will stand with them.
Rob Nixon
Douglas Haynes has written an intimate, intrepid, and hugely consequential book in the spirit of Katherine Boo’s bestseller, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. He offers us a rare and deeply moving bottom-up view of the precarious lives of the rural migrants who are swelling our planet’s cities by one million people per week. This is a remarkable book about some of the most decisive concerns to shape our century: the sprawl of unplanned cities, accelerating environmental crises, the widening gulf between the rich and the abandoned, and, through it all, the always-surprising new forms of human resilience.
Bill McKibben
This is a vivid and gritty account of life in the kind of urban shantytown where a huge percentage of humanity lives out a lifetime. Surviving there is hard and getting harder, as a changing environment multiplies the misery—and demands real action from all of us. A crucial read.
