Publisher: Dutton
First Publication: 2021
Book Review: The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
Leave it to John Green to take a seemingly absurd creative premise—crafting a book-length collection of satirical reviews for abstract concepts and modern curiosities, all graded on a five-star scale—and spin it into an utterly transcendent meditation on the pain and peculiarities of human existence. That’s precisely what he’s achieved with The Anthropocene Reviewed, a delightfully idiosyncratic mélange of comic observations and soulful insights that somehow manages to feel both profoundly personal and cosmically universal all at once.
From the moment Green dives into surprisingly intricate anthropological breakdowns of everything from air conditioning units to Halley’s Comet and humanity’s rapidly multiplying threat to global sustainability, you realize this genre-defying collection is operating on an entirely different spiritual wavelength than your typical compendium of humorous musings or belletristic navel-gazing. These are profoundly emotional excursions cloaked in the virally sharable curiosities of our modern world—tiny anthropological dioramas that double as windows into their author’s innermost hopes, fears, and hard-won revelations about what it means to exist during this chaotic new epoch.
Part of what makes Green’s latest such an unexpectedly transcendent experience is the sheer changeability and tonal flexibility of his authorial perspective from section to section. One review entry, he might be donning his classic self-effacing funnyman persona to poke gentle fun at our culture’s insatiable appetite for LMFAO-ready viral animal memes and our paradoxical enslavement to humanity’s least-evolved impulses despite all the existential dread hanging overhead. The next, he’s shape-shifted into a pensive philosopher-poet grappling with the enormity of climate crisis in hushed reveries of exquisite tenderness.
And yet, for all the disparate eccentricities he covers—some trivial, some laced with shattering levels of personal reckoning—the book’s radiant unifying heart never stops shining through. Green has this magical ability to alchemize even the most random or seemingly banal of topics into profound character studies and riffs on the human condition. Whether expounding on the sublime pleasures of eating a bowl of decadent soup in silence, unpacking the tangled personal origins behind our family’s handyman-level smoke detector installation habits, or scaling up to contemplate the magnitude of Hieronymus Bosch’s damning artistic visions, his authorial gaze is always present—whip-smart but humbled, hilarious but bruised, cynical but perenially optimistic about our species’s chaotic trajectory.
While The Anthropocene Reviewed might lack the same rigorous narrative arc and central dramatic stakes of Green’s adored fiction, in many ways that fragmentary nature only amplifies the book’s resonance. Like all great literary chameleons, he understands the transcendent power that comes with shaking up the form to more accurately mirror the disorderly churn of a contemplative mind grasping for cosmic insights amidst the detritus of modernity. No two vignettes here resemble each other on a macro level, yet they all unmistakably funnel outward from the same profound existential wellspring—a spirit trying to make sense of the eternal human strifes in whatever kaleidoscopic guises are readily available.
That vibrant sense of searching for the sublime and elemental within the increasingly dizzying context of our information age hollows lingers long after you’ve digested each individual entry, too. From the opening gambit of Green presenting his uniquely optimistic take on the “Anthropocene” concept as a “studdly” opportunity for humanity to redeem its environmental follies through determined innovation and ingenuity, to the closing avalanche of emotional profundities that come crashing down when he finally weighs in on things like engagements and grammar nuances, every page courses with the author’s boundless intellectual curiosity about what it means to be alive and questing during these abnormal times.
That sense of dogged striving for awe and self-actualization amidst the relentless static and global devastation we’re all swimming through every day is what elevates The Anthropocene Reviewed from mere compendium of clever musings into a quietly monumental artistic achievement. Much like Rebecca Solnit or view environmentalism Philalethes, Green is grounding us in the radical reassurance that so much ageless truth and revelatory splendor still abides in plain sight—if only we make the effort to shake ourselves free from distraction’s trance and look at our surroundings with the same ravenous hunger for beauty that animates his insights.
For all its free-wheeling eccentricities and profuse digressions, The Anthropocene Reviewed is ultimately about training yourself to spot and savor the sacred, sublime, and deeply human in absolutely everything. Even something as ostensibly trivial as a viral Tumblr craze or your parents’ bizarre home maintenance rituals provides a gateway into reaffirming our eternal connectedness to patterns older than language. If Green’s anything, he’s a ferociously energetic celebrant and evangelist for the profoundly interesting complexities woven into every last errant detail of human existence on our beleaguered planet—comic, cosmic, and everything in between. What might initially scan as gratuitous quirk quickly coheres into a hearteningly earnest tapestry of transcendental life notes—an homage to our flickering yet boundlessly alluring capacity for wakefulness amid spiritual entropy.
By book’s end, this ostensible novelty read reveals itself to be a resounding clarion call for embracing the beauty and curiosity swirling all around us every day, even under circumstances of perpetual crisis and apparent grimness. In Green’s eyes, there’s simply no excuse for not beholding the sacred with fresh affirmation on a daily basis—not when something as unheroically mundane as an air conditioning unit or a bummer of a smoke detector can serve as windows into our strange souls’ profoundest reverberations.
So prepare to laugh, contemplate, marvel, and maybe even tear up a little bit while drifting through these discursive galactic eddies and eddy fragments. Far from the belittling irony-pedlars of so much modern “satire,” Green’s anthropological wanderings are stitched together from life’s most abounding compassions. We’re all hurtling toward a common mysterious destination, he seems to suggest, so we might as well cherish and fanatically catalogue every last silly and sublime quirk that we can along the journey. That’s not just a worthy aspiration for the age of extinction ahead; it’s a clarion mission statement on making peace with the acute absurdities surrounding our earthly pilgrimages.