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

About the Book

From the author of Work Won't Love You Back, a stirring examination of how collective grief can ignite powerful change.

Our era is one of significant and substantial loss, yet we barely have time to acknowledge it. The losses range from the personal grief of a single COVID death to the planetary disaster wrought by climate change, in an age of unraveling hopes and expectations, of dreams curtailed, of aspirations desiccated.

This is capitalism's death phase. It has become clear that the cost of wealth creation for a few is enormous destruction for others, for the marginalized and the vulnerable but increasingly for all of us. At the same time, we are denied the means of mourning those futures that are being so brutally curtailed.

At such a moment, taking the time to grieve is a political act. Sarah Jaffe shows how the act of public memorialization has become a radical statement, a vibrant response to loss, and a path to imagining a better world. When we are able to grieve well the ones we have lost, the causes they fought for, or the examples they bequeathed us, we are better prepared to fight for a transformed future.

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.

Review :
"[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)

"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 "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) " 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 "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