Synopses & Reviews
A Vogue Most Anticipated Book of 2023
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 sublime — seeing an iceberg for the first time; the staggering waves of the Drake Passage; the torqued, unfamiliar contours of Thwaites — alongside 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 voices — with the colorful stories and personalities of Rush's shipmates — in a thrilling chorus.
Urgent and brave, absorbing and vulnerable, The Quickening is another essential book from Elizabeth Rush.
Review
"The Quickening took me on an immersive journey through both exterior and interior landscapes, deftly crossing the boundaries between the frigid Antarctic and the warm heart. Elizabeth Rush's writing is multilayered, from fascinating scientific accounts to intimate human stories and deep examinations of how we live deliberately in a melting world." Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass
Review
"In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush chronicles a months-long journey to the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica with scientists who are conducting research that will help us better understand how global warming is reshaping our planet. As with Rising, this book is beautifully written, deeply felt, and thoroughly researched….Antarctica is a mysterious, terrifying, vast place and Rush captures all of it with genuine curiosity and intelligence. This book is at once a love letter and a meditation and a gentle warning — and we very much need all three." Roxane Gay
Review
"The Quickening is the Antarctic book I've been waiting for — an immersive modern day expedition tale, a reflection on science and knowledge-making, a confrontation with gendered histories, and a brilliant writer's spellbinding meditation on human mistakes, distant goals, and courage." Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning: A Novel
Review
"The Quickening is 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 of Under a White Sky
About the Author
Elizabeth Rush is the author of The 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; and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, 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.