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Several years ago I worked my way through John Green’s fiction writings, then more recently I was recommended his podcast and youtube channel, both run with his brother, also author, Hank Green. I’ve enjoyed their chatter, and when I heard about this book I thought it’d be an interesting read, very different from his other stuff.

Let’s start with a definition, the Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current era of Earth’s history. This book comes out of a podcast of the same title, and is a set of essays which are all fundamentally reviews of different things, as Green used to write book reviews for a living before he became an author.

Some chapters were more serious than others, I think I’d assumed the whole book would be a bit more tongue in cheek, which is maybe why I didn’t give it as high a rating as I expected to. I learnt about some really interesting things, such as the Lascaux cave paintings, and the Champion’s League final 2005. There were also chapters on Diet Dr Pepper, Scratch’n’Sniff stickers, and the world’s largest ball of paint.

My paperback edition had a couple of extra bonus essays at the back, one of which felt very much like it was repeating an earlier story he shared, but who knows if it was just something I’d recently heard elsewhere as it wasn’t personal to him!

Of course, there were quotes to repeat:

• “Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”
• “Humans are already an ecological catastrophe […] for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.”
• “It’s no coincidence that the scientific revolution in Britain coincided with the rise of British participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the growing wealth being extracted from colonies and enslaved labour.”
• [Discussing how we can’t look directly at the sun] “In the Book of Exodus, God says, ‘You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.’ No wonder that Christian writers have for centuries been punning on Jesus as being both Son and Sun.”
• “Colour is a fiction of light.” – Tacita Dean
• “What’s news isn’t primarily what is noteworthy or important, but what is new.”
• “It’s been my experience that almost everything easy to mock turns out to be interesting if you pay closer attention.”
• “Cholera continues to spread and kill not because we lack the tools to understand or treat the disease as we did two hundred years ago, but because each day, as a human community, we decide not to prioritize the health of people living in poverty. Like tuberculosis, malaria, and many other infectious diseases, cholera is only successful in the twenty-first century because the rich world doesn’t feel threatened by it. As Tina Rosenberg has written, “Probably the worst thing that ever happened to malaria in poor nations was its eradication in rich ones.”
• “Even the most extraordinary genius can accomplish very little alone.”
• “Almost everything turns out to be interesting if you pay the right kind of attention to it.”