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.”—Jonathan Lethem 

A propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control.

Floods, geoengineering, climate crisis. Her first year in Margaretville, New York, Jennifer Kabat wakes to a rain-swollen stream and three-foot waves in her basement.

This is far from the first—and hardly the worst—natural disaster to devastate her town. As Kabat dives deeper into the region’s fraught environmental history, she discovers it was more than once the site of Cold War weather experimentation. She traces connections across history, following a technology that spirals up from a 1950 flood in her town to the Vietnam War, the Reagan presidency, and a present day “fix” for climate change. She encounters unlikely characters along the way, including two scientists at General Electric: Vincent Schaefer, who never finished high school, and Kurt Vonnegut’s older brother Bernard. And all the while she searches for ways to cope with the grief of her environmentalist father’s recent passing. “Because I need the water to speak to me too,” she writes.

Inquisitive and experimental, Nightshining uses place as a palimpsest of history, digging into questions of personal responsibility and planetary change. With “characteristically lyrical incision” (Marko Gluhaich), Kabat circles back to her own life experience and the essence of being human—the cosmos thrumming in our bodies, connecting readers to the land around us and time before us.