“You’re lucky you got to grow up and become an adult before the planet exploded.”

This remark from her seven-year-old turned Anya Kamenetz’s life upside down. How could she offer reassurance when she was just as terrified? In Falling In Love With the World Again, Kamenetz grapples with the polycrisis— an emerging term for today’s rampant interwoven threats from climate change and political upheavals to chronic economic and personal stresses.

Exquisitely blending memoir and reportage, Kamenetz threads her own story of working through numbness and overwhelm, fear, despair, rage, and grief as a mother and wife at midlife, with the findings of interdisciplinary experts whose insights offer new paradigms for individual and collective growth. While it may be tempting to disengage rather than face our increasingly unstable world, avoidance causes long-term harm. Kamenetz discovers the wonder, meaning, and even joy that arise from directly engaging with the hard questions of our time.

For those of us concerned about what the constant threats of disaster are doing to ourselves, our children, and our communities, Kamenetz illuminates a better path forward–one that invites us to meet this extraordinary moment with full hearts.