Highlights
‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’ by John Green is the first non-fiction book by the popular Young Adult writer.
Based on the popular podcast on the same name, the book is a series of essays that reviews different parts of the human experience. Anthropocene is a proposed name for our geologic age, where humans have shaped the planet to our desire and the book takes some aspects of humanity and reviews them on a five-star scale. From Mario Kart to air-conditioning, from certain songs to Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, this book has a diverse yet interesting list of phenomena Green decided to review. Each essay talks about a subject, its connection to the author’s life, and ends with a rating.
The book reads like a memoir exploring the author's life through all the things that affected him strongly; he has also provided a few good examples to explain his beliefs. Just like John Green’s other books, ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’ too teaches the reader a lot about the world while encouraging them to think in different ways about the information provided to us. Green wrote this book during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. And so, in some chapters, he writes about how the Coronavirus pandemic has changed our world. Though ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’ highlights the human mess with all its flaws, the book always remains hopeful which makes it a good quarantine read.
