A review by caughtbetweenpages
The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green

emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

I've been a Vlog Brothers fan since I was I think in, like, middle school or high school, and I have read everything that John Green has ever written and for me The Anthropocene Reviewed is the best thing he's ever done. The humor and the compassion and the passion with which he writes about these various topics, whether he five- or one-stars them, acts not only as a sort of viewpoint into this one man's mind and his feelings about the world, but also in a very real way creates a pastiche and a collage of the anthropocene/the human era. But also those aren't the things that *I* necessarily would have chosen to write about as a emblematic portion of stuff to review from the anthropocene, and I'm pretty sure they're not the things that *you* watching this would have chosen if you were the one writing an Anthropocene Reviewed book. So in addition to being a collage that's emblematic of this time, it's also a collage that's very emblematic of John Green's time on this world and the things that he chooses to put his focus on. So it's an anthropologic study, but maybe it's mostly an anthropologic study of John Green and his preoccupations. I don't know. But I did very much enjoy it! Many of these scripts were written during the covid times, so there is a sort of everpresent sort of looming cloud of the awareness of that Great and Ongoing human tragedy coloring the feelings about the other things being talked about, but that in no way detracts from the honesty with which they are written. I really don't know how to talk about this further; it's it's so specific and each individual chapter (I guess you'd call it section?) of the book is its own unique thing, and the collection of them as I mentioned earlier are quite eclectic, so it's hard to talk about how one bridges into the other very much (if it bridges at all).