Some Thoughts on The Anthropocene Reviewed by: John Green

 

There is a misconception among the general public about the need for narrative.  Narrative is the glue that holds a book together, not necessarily referring to a plot, but how the book is presented. Non-fiction relies on narrative to convey a point, short form literature needs narrative to hold together an anthology, and The Anthropocene Reviewed is a book that proves that.  John Green is an author whom I probably will never read much more of, his particular style of literature is not one that I am fond of, though never say never.  The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays on a variety of topics, ranging from Diet Dr Pepper, to plague, and even a particular photograph that affected him.  At its core this is a book about humanity, reflecting on some of our greatest accomplishments and the tendency to leave destruction in its wake but also building up the species to its great potential.  It’s a book that takes disparate threads and essays, written over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, adapting some of its material from a podcast that John Green wrote and released from 2018 to 2020.  Some of the essays adapted are presented here but every essay is written with the format of narrative in mind.  This is a book where you get to a point where the reader is asking themselves if Green will be ever giving something five stars, and suddenly along comes the essay where Green gives out the coveted five star rating.  Writing negative reviews is also something Green has mastered, not demanding some aspect of the world just be ignored or no longer exist but examine some aspect of society.  There is a section on bacteria that becomes a tale about the issues with public health and the systemic inequality, or how plague turns into a story about the cyclic nature of history.  It opens with a decrying of the five star rating system in the introduction while ending every essay with a rating, nothing getting zero stars (very few essays being rated below three).  The Anthropocene itself is the main period of humanity and the existential crisis that comes along with the dawn of humanity as a speck of dusts.  This is perhaps a book best described as a love letter to humanity and an examination of just what people do.  I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five stars.