Nightshining

“Jennifer Kabat’s Nightshining sifts a riveting exposé of the Cold War technocratic fantasy-state through lyrical family memoir. Her superb investigation calls to mind those of Rebecca Solnit and Errol Morris, among others.”

“Nightshining is a book of belonging, belief, care, and legacy. Jennifer Kabat writes powerfully against narratives of progress, without abandoning wonder, passion, or possibility. By unpacking her own history, she asks what inheritance means on both big and small scales, prompting us to question long-held belief systems. In this catastrophic time, what must we continue to hold dear, of ourselves and the planet? What must we learn to do without, rupture, destroy? This book is intimate yet vast—meticulous and monumental.”

“In this prismatic book, Jennifer Kabat threads together floods, the Catskills, her father, rainmakers, the Cold War, climate change, the Mohawk Nation, small towns, and Kurt Vonnegut, among other subjects, into a complex emotional pattern that makes the past live—because it has never gone away.”

“Nightshining rockets from deepest time to last Thursday, from Doomsday weapons to the endless mystery of one’s parents, socialist dreams and capitalist nightmares, the Cold War then to daily life now in our seriously unhinged country. Like Kurt Vonnegut, whom she invokes and whose brother looms large in Nightshining, the book bounds through impossible dilemmas, fueled by shimmering upper atmosphere ice crystals. Kabat has next-level powers of discernment and shimmering prose. She writes with a calm fury, precise and generous and exacting. Her neatest trick is convincing us—despite all evidence—that all is not lost and that there’s reason for hope. I want to believe.”