What do you think?
Rate this book
To See Beyond
A globe-spanning essay collection on the human condition from the author James McBride calls “one of the most creative and important nonfiction writers in our era”
Our hyper-informed digital era of climate catastrophe, historically unmatched migration, and genocide confronts us with a terrible conundrum: the pain and struggles of others are more visible than ever, yet hostility and loneliness persist. It often seems that we are on the edge of ruin, and hope, though necessary, is elusive. How can we reconcile ourselves to the world we have made?
In To See Beyond, Anna Badkhen probes the ways we ward off despair as she imagines the language we need for survival. Through engagement with contemporary literature and stories of everyday encounters with people around the world, she brings us closer to understanding how we balance delight and grief, joy and hurt, and choose to embrace life as a form of resistance.
Our hyper-informed digital era of climate catastrophe, historically unmatched migration, and genocide confronts us with a terrible conundrum: the pain and struggles of others are more visible than ever, yet hostility and loneliness persist. It often seems that we are on the edge of ruin, and hope, though necessary, is elusive. How can we reconcile ourselves to the world we have made?
In To See Beyond, Anna Badkhen probes the ways we ward off despair as she imagines the language we need for survival. Through engagement with contemporary literature and stories of everyday encounters with people around the world, she brings us closer to understanding how we balance delight and grief, joy and hurt, and choose to embrace life as a form of resistance.
- GenresNonfictionEssays
192 pages, Paperback
Published April 28, 2026
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 14, 2026
Absolutely remarkable. Badkhen is a brilliant writer, a knife sharp thinker, and a humanist with a soul the depth of the ocean.
June 11, 2026
What does an ancient ruin tell us? That out of great suffering rises great beauty, over time, sometimes. (“Some will call it shrapnel. And some will call it art,” writes Ocean Vuong.) Is there consolation in that? I don’t know. I am becoming, in the realest of times, a beautiful ruin.
Maybe when people feel acutely for their loved ones it is because of the entanglement of the particles of the heart. Maybe quantum physics is the modern iteration of a folktale, the latest way of retelling our connectedness.
How have I never read this amazing essayist before? Such a wide-ranging, wide-angle, wide awake collection of the human condition on this blue marble we live on, from nearly every corner of it. Eyes wide open, heart and mind open, the writer takes on journeys like short stories, like poems, like prayers. Amazing, required reading for the human condition.
The philosopher Jonathan Lear describes courage in the face of cultural collapse as “radical hope.” “Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it,” he explains. “This is a daunting form of commitment: to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp it.” Lear talks specifically about the predicament of the Crow Nation in the face of settler colonialist expansion in the United States, but also, more broadly, about the vulnerability of the human condition. Ruin, he writes, “is a possibility we all must live with—even when our culture is robust.
. . It is a possibility that marks us as human.” Ours is the era of human-made geological crisis; of historically unmatched migration and concomitant fencing-in; a hyperinformed time, when chronicles of one another’s lives are numbingly accessible yet our hostility toward one another persists; when genocide denial and the rise of fascism are the norm; and when more people than ever in history are living alone. It often seems that we are on the edge of ruin, that we have already stepped over that edge. How do we hold on and what do we hold on to as we are continually coming to terms with the world we are tearing apart, a place that contains both joy and hurt; and how do we honor and hold both the delight and the grief at a time of historical reconsideration?
The essays in this collection weave in and out of war zones on three continents but are united by the common questions: What is our responsibility to one another and to this depraved world, and how do our individual relationships tether us to hope? How do we dream, how do we reach for what we can build differently? How do we love accordingly?
I’ve heard people say, “A person who asks questions will never be lost in the world.” But doesn’t that depend on the questions? Are we asking the right questions? Will our children be able to read the map we leave behind?
From where I stand, outside, I like to imagine that my friends are safe, even if they aren’t, and warm, even if they aren’t. And above us, the mottled spilled milk of our galaxy is expanding invisibly to us yet faster than the speed of sound, fleeing itself madly, in a mad rush begun billions of years ago. There is hope in that.
One soft March sunset, I stood on a small rise to the east of Herto Bouri. The tuff around me probably held the petrified remains of many more ancestors; I was possibly standing on some of them. The land swelled and dropped, stretched the skyline and drove it close, made out of distance an accordion, made my sense of perspective and scale as unreliable as my sense of time. There, I could see to the other side of the Afar Depression, where volcanoes gleamed, abraded by time and blued by distance; there, the Earth curved much closer, dusted the sky where some children were driving home flocks of goats along the horizon—how far were they, or how long ago? I thought of Maimonides, who wrote in the twelfth century, “God is not a body, and therefore there can be no relation between Him and time. Similarly no relation is possible between Him and space.” But time and space were very much present in this biblical place.
Maybe when people feel acutely for their loved ones it is because of the entanglement of the particles of the heart. Maybe quantum physics is the modern iteration of a folktale, the latest way of retelling our connectedness.
How have I never read this amazing essayist before? Such a wide-ranging, wide-angle, wide awake collection of the human condition on this blue marble we live on, from nearly every corner of it. Eyes wide open, heart and mind open, the writer takes on journeys like short stories, like poems, like prayers. Amazing, required reading for the human condition.
The philosopher Jonathan Lear describes courage in the face of cultural collapse as “radical hope.” “Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it,” he explains. “This is a daunting form of commitment: to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp it.” Lear talks specifically about the predicament of the Crow Nation in the face of settler colonialist expansion in the United States, but also, more broadly, about the vulnerability of the human condition. Ruin, he writes, “is a possibility we all must live with—even when our culture is robust.
. . It is a possibility that marks us as human.” Ours is the era of human-made geological crisis; of historically unmatched migration and concomitant fencing-in; a hyperinformed time, when chronicles of one another’s lives are numbingly accessible yet our hostility toward one another persists; when genocide denial and the rise of fascism are the norm; and when more people than ever in history are living alone. It often seems that we are on the edge of ruin, that we have already stepped over that edge. How do we hold on and what do we hold on to as we are continually coming to terms with the world we are tearing apart, a place that contains both joy and hurt; and how do we honor and hold both the delight and the grief at a time of historical reconsideration?
The essays in this collection weave in and out of war zones on three continents but are united by the common questions: What is our responsibility to one another and to this depraved world, and how do our individual relationships tether us to hope? How do we dream, how do we reach for what we can build differently? How do we love accordingly?
I’ve heard people say, “A person who asks questions will never be lost in the world.” But doesn’t that depend on the questions? Are we asking the right questions? Will our children be able to read the map we leave behind?
From where I stand, outside, I like to imagine that my friends are safe, even if they aren’t, and warm, even if they aren’t. And above us, the mottled spilled milk of our galaxy is expanding invisibly to us yet faster than the speed of sound, fleeing itself madly, in a mad rush begun billions of years ago. There is hope in that.
One soft March sunset, I stood on a small rise to the east of Herto Bouri. The tuff around me probably held the petrified remains of many more ancestors; I was possibly standing on some of them. The land swelled and dropped, stretched the skyline and drove it close, made out of distance an accordion, made my sense of perspective and scale as unreliable as my sense of time. There, I could see to the other side of the Afar Depression, where volcanoes gleamed, abraded by time and blued by distance; there, the Earth curved much closer, dusted the sky where some children were driving home flocks of goats along the horizon—how far were they, or how long ago? I thought of Maimonides, who wrote in the twelfth century, “God is not a body, and therefore there can be no relation between Him and time. Similarly no relation is possible between Him and space.” But time and space were very much present in this biblical place.
June 16, 2026
An incredible collection of essays about how humans destroy, cope, and survive. Badhken’s descriptions of her global encounters are so beautifully written and make you reconsider what you know about the world and how we interact with it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews