I have a somewhat complicated relationship with John Green’s work. I discovered him not through his writing but through the YouTube channel he and his brother run, and I have read only the most recent of his novels, which I liked but which has not inspired me to go back and read the rest. What I appreciate about his videos is their thoughtfulness, their humility, and their constant reaching for complexity and compassion. I don’t always agree with them, mind you – there is lots of room for encounter and dialogue between Green’s US left-liberal sensibility and my own more resolutely leftward take on things, but there are points of sharp divergence as well. But it is less the substance of his positions than his approach to thinking them through in public – again, their thoughtfulness, humility, complexity, and compassion – that I appreciate and that I feel I have something to learn from.
This book, based on a podcast of the same name, is a collection of essays where Green reviews elements of the “Anthropocene” – a contender for the name of the new era in Earth’s history where humanity (“anthro-“) is the determining factor in shaping the trajectory of life on the planet – on a five star scale. This includes things like Diet Dr Pepper, sunsets, Halley’s comet, viral meningitis, and Super Mario Kart. And if you have watched his videos, you can probably take a guess at what these essays are like. Certainly my reaction to them is very similar to my reaction to his videos. There are points of divergence, no doubt, starting from the book’s title – there are some moments of acknowledgement in the book of the violent legacies of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery and their ongoing force in the present but I think all of those (and the struggles to transform them) need to saturate our understanding of the world and our lives rather than merely being touched upon from time to time, and that difference is for me exemplified by the book’s use of the word “Anthropocene,” which has been strongly contested particularly by Indigenous thinkers (but also others) who point out that it is not a generalized humanity that has brought our shared planet to this point but a particular subset of humanity and a particular way of organizing the social world. That said, there is much that is useful, much that is interesting, much that is thoughtful, much that is kind in this book, as well as perhaps a surprising (or maybe not?) amount that is somewhat bleak. I enjoyed reading it and I learned from it, though again that learning was more about Green’s modelling of how to think and live in public than any individual bit of information and analysis he conveyed. And that includes, by the way, learning from his writing, and its capacity to start from some seemingly arbitrary artifact in the social world and use that in combination with skilfully deployed memoir and research, a bit of humour, and unabashed earnestness to reach people in a way that more rigorously scholarly or more hifalutin literary writing never will. Not for everyone, probably, but I enjoyed it.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.