The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of stars. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June."

What a wonderful way to begin the second half of 2021! John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021) is the best book I have read this year so far, and only my second five-star rating in six months. The book is a collection of 46 short essays on various manifestations of human life and human culture. (In a gimmick that will sound familiar for us Goodreads members, the author provides a rating for each such anthropocene manifestation on a five-star scale.)

Anthropocene is usually defined as "the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment." Yet, the book is not really focused on human influence on the environment. Yes, the author makes it clear that the human race has been succeeding in its job of destroying the planet, but this is not his main point. I love the book so much because he shows that despite all the infinite and perpetual human suffering - pain, disease, pandemics, failure, fear, loneliness, and eventual death - life is beautiful and the world is beautiful. We just need to look carefully.

Being a "word person" as opposed to an "image person" (to me, one right word is often worth a thousand images; and in most cases I care more how the authors write than what they write about), I admire John Green's prose. In the unforgettable essay Sunsets, he defends the appreciation of "the clichéd beauty of an ostentatious sunset":

"It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, [...] And so I try to turn toward that scattered light, belly out, and I tell myself [...] It is a sunset, and it is beautiful, and this whole thing you've been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That's bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunset five stars."

In one of the most moving essays, Auld Lang Syne, where the author mentions the death of his friend, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, the reader will find the following passage of evocative prose:

"And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past -- seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them -- and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us."

This is not to say that it is just the writing that I admire in Anthropocene; in all the essays there is so much wisdom about life and about being human. Lascaux Cave Paintings is, to me, the best essay in the collection. The author writes about Palaeolithic paintings made by people who lived about 17,000 years ago. Some of the paintings are the so-called "negative hand stencils" that all kids produce at some point of their childhood. John Green writes:

"[...] the hand stencils say, 'I was here.' They say, 'You are not new.'"

While the members of each human generation - the Boomers like myself, the Millennials like my daughter, or Gen Alpha like my grandkids - want to think that they and their times are unique in history, we all are really the same, and the Lascaux Cave artists are our great-great-... repeat about 600 times... -great-great-grandparents. We are human, we live, we love, and we die.

There is so much more in the collection! Great Gatsby, velociraptors, scratch 'n' sniff stickers, air conditioning, Jerzy Dudek - the Polish goalkeeper of Liverpool F.C., Doi's circle drawings, and more and more. And there is even laugh-out-loud humor:

"I don't labor under the delusion that the United States is an exemplary or even particularly exceptional nation, but we do have a lot of the world's largest balls."

This is a book full of beautiful prose, sweetness, and love of life and of the world. I guess the only way to enhance the reading experience would be to listen to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World while reading.

I would like to thank my outstanding former student for giving me this book as a birthday gift.

Five stars.

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