Review: The Anthropocene Reviewed

 The Anthropocene Reviewed is a book full of random reviews written by John Green. I was, of course, uneasy about reading another piece of non-fiction by him, given my one experience with his non-fiction left me feeling dumber for having read it.

Fortunately, this book avoids all the weaknesses of Everything is Tuberculosis. For one, every essays is relatively short, no more than 3-5 pages, essentially a blog post or short podcast, which is a format that enables any competent writer to hide his lack of knowledge about any topic.

Secondly, since he picks essentially random things to write about, and frequently the title of the topic is only a jumping off point to either a different point that caught Green's attention or for Green to provide some sort of autobiography, the human interest side-stories that would annoy me in a longer piece of work doesn't annoy me here. I will note that in the middle of this book, I had to take a break to read another book as a palette cleanser --- even in this format, I can only cope with unadulterated non-fiction Green for 100 pages or so at a time.

I learned that he settled down in Indianapolis, but that Kurt Vonnegut was also from there. He did note that Vonnegut moved away as soon as he could and never returned:

Indianapolis’s favorite literary son, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Home ownership was all maintenance. There were always window treatments to install and light bulbs to change. The water heater kept breaking. And most of all, there was the lawn. God, I hated mowing the lawn. The lawn and the mini-malls of 86th and Ditch became the two poles of my resentment. I couldn’t wait for Sarah to get a job somewhere else. (kindle loc 2163)

There was one particularly poignant story in which he discusses being on call as a trainee chaplain when he's asked to  serve when a badly burnt little boy of 3 came in. He described the story as one of the contributors to him quitting his career as a chaplain to become a writer, but then he finds out later that the boy survived.

The voice of the book is unaffected, at times sensitive, and at times very contemporary bro-like. Green seems to be an interesting character. I'm afraid to watch his youtube videos or podcasts for fear that I won't like him very much if I see or hear him instead of reading him.

In any case, I had fun reading the book. The star rating (1-5 stars) is kinda used weirdly. I give them book 3.5 stars.