Summary: A series of essays, often biographical, formated as product or experience reviews.
I am a fan of John Green. We are not much alike, but I have often wondered if we would get along and be friends given the chance. We both love books. He was scheduled to go to the University of Chicago Divinity School right after I graduated from the Divinity School. However, after working as a chaplain at a children’s hospital, he changed his mind about his career path and never started. We are both very earnest introverts close to the same age. We are married with two young kids close to the same age. And most other things are pretty different.
However, the Anthropocene Reviewed does seem designed particularly for me. The Anthropocene is the current geological age. And this series of essays is framed as product reviews from that current geological age. The reviews are a mix of funny, short, long, serious, random, and current event-focused. I have written thousands of reviews. I have reviewed almost every book I have read for the last 12 years, over 1500 of them. And because of those reviews, Amazon contacted me years ago to see if I would like to be one of their product reviewers. I was just outside of being one of their top 500 reviewers at one point in time. I looked, and as of today, I have just under 3000 reviews on Amazon (some written by my wife), and I am the 1075th most popular reviewer on Amazon. A reality that makes me very ambivalent about the idea of product reviews.
But as Green says early in the book, those reviews often reveal more about the author than the product. John Green is well known as a young adult author that deals with mental illness and other heavy topics. In The Anthropocene Reviewed, he is more directly opening up about his struggles with mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, than he can in fiction. And in a format that does not seem to be directly about him, John Green reveals an enormous amount about himself as he pretends to be writing about products or experiences.
Like most people, the reviews are mostly four stars. Roughly 1/3 of the way through, he writes about how it can be hard to fully embrace a deep love of something and then gives his first five-star review. There are also 1-star reviews. This book started as a podcast, which was impacted by the Covid pandemic. So much of the book is a reflection on or at least conscious of 2020 and early 2021. So he reviews Plagues and Staphylococcus Aureus and Canadian Geese and the Internet and Piggly Wiggly, but as a person in 2020 and 2021.
As a product reviewer, I can tell you that product reviews make little difference in the world. But making sense of the world does matter. And as the real purpose of The Anthropocene Review is to make sense of the world, it is excellent. I devoured it, finishing it in less than 48 hours. Although I do not struggle with mental illness in the ways that John Green does, his explanation and descriptions I find enormously helpful to understand those who do struggle with depression and other mental illnesses, I do relate to the attempts to understand and make sense of a world that does not always make a lot of sense.
I listened to this on audiobook, with John Green narrating. He speaks a lot about how uncomfortable he is in front of people and around people. But as I know him significantly through his work on Crash Course and his other work as a YouTube star, that is somewhat hard to reconcile with his very public persona. But it does mean that the book is made better by his narration. So this is a book that I would probably recommend listening to. But it is also a book with genuine wisdom, and I will likely reread it, more slowly and in print.
The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green Purchase Links: Hardcover, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook