The Anthropocene Reviewed

Spotify Premium comes with audiobooks and has been promoting them on my home page. I figured I’d start with The Anthropocene Reviewed. I like watching vlogbrothers videos and the author, John Green, is a vlogbrother. I like listening to podcasts and The Anthropocene Reviewed started as a podcast. I thought its origin would lend itself towards easy consumption as an audiobook.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays on different aspects of the human-made world. Topics range from the abstract (“Humanity’s Temporal Range”) to the concrete (“Lascaux Cave Paintings”), from the mundane (“Diet Dr Pepper”) to the profound (The Orbital Sunrise), and from the positive (“The Smallpox Vaccine”) to the negative (“Staphylococcus aureus”). Nominally, the goal of each essay is to rate the subject on a 5 star scale, but, really, each essay is a vessel for John to explore different aspects of the human experience.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is also a deeply personal work, verging on autobiography. Many reviews center around significant events in John’s life. Auld Lang Syne revolves around John’s relationship with Amy Krause Rosenthal and her passing. Googling Strangers revolves around John’s time as a hospital chaplain and a particular time when he had to comfort the parents of an infant with severe burns.

The book has great highs; I loved the reviews of “Jerzy Dudek’s Performance on May 25, 2005”, “Harvey”, “Auld Lang Syne”, “Indianapolis”, and “Googling Strangers”. It drags in spots as John tries to extract meaning from places where there isn’t much to be found. The approach which works so well for Sunsets doesn’t work as well for “Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Stickers”. I found myself struggling to pay attention while these reviews played. Fortunately, most of the reviews are good, and the bad reviews are sparse. After each bad review is a review that makes you reconsider life in the Anthropocene.

I give The Anthropocene Reviewed 4 and a half stars.