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From the Ashes

Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire

Contributors

By Sarah Jaffe

Formats and Prices

Price

$18.99

Price

$24.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 10, 2024. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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. 

  • “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

On Sale
Sep 10, 2024
Page Count
400 pages
Publisher
Bold Type Books
ISBN-13
9781541703513

Sarah Jaffe

About the Author

Sarah Jaffe is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone, which Jane McAlevey called “a multiplex in still life; a stunning critique of capitalism, a collective conversation on the meaning of life and work, and a definite contribution to the we-won’t-settle-for-less demands of the future society everyone deserves,” and of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, both from Bold Type Books.

She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets. Her work has appeared in The New York TimesThe Nation, the Guardian, the Washington PostThe New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum.

Sarah was formerly a staff writer at In These Times and the labor editor at AlterNet. She was a contributing editor on The 99%: How the Occupy Wall Street Movement is Changing America, from AlterNet books, as well as a contributor to the anthologies At the Tea Party and Tales of Two Cities, both from OR Books, and Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America, from Picador. She was also the web director at GRITtv with Laura Flanders.

She was one of the first reporters to cover Occupy and the Fight for $15, has appeared on numerous radio and television programs to discuss topics ranging from electoral politics to Superstorm Sandy, from punk rock to public-sector unions.

She has a master’s degree in journalism from Temple University in Philadelphia and a bachelor’s degree in English from Loyola University New Orleans. Sarah was born and raised in Massachusetts and has also lived in South Carolina, Louisiana, Colorado, New York and Pennsylvania.

Learn more about this author