ŷ������

Anthropocene (noun): the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

Have you ever heard that term before now? I sure hadn’t before coming across John Green’s excellent 2021 essay collection, written during COVID lockdown, in which he reviews a wide range of aspects of our existence.

Yes, John Green is the author of uber-popular Young Adult novels like The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska. But no, this is not really a book targeted to those readers. Rather, it’s written for those who delight in the mundane and revel in the extraordinary. Nonfiction lovers who read to learn could do a heck of a lot worse than to give a chance to Green’s first nonfiction foray.

In this collection, topics covered include anything and everything: teddy bears, Kentucky bluegrass, velociraptors, whispering, viral meningitis, Monopoly, Diet Dr Pepper, sunsets, and many more. Green gives a bit of historical or contextual background, shares his perspective on the subject, then rates it on a 5-star scale.

I rarely quote from books in my reviews, but seeing as how this particular one is quite meta in that I’m reviewing a book about reviews for people that primarily read and write reviews, I found this section of the Introduction fascinating:


“The five-star scale has only been used in critical analysis for the past few decades. While it occasionally applied to film criticism as early as the 1950s, the five-star scale wasn’t used to rate hotels until 1979, and it wasn’t widely used to rate books until Amazon introduced user reviews. The five-star scale really doesn’t exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era. Making conclusions about a book’s quality from a 175-word review is hard for artificial intelligences, where as star ratings are ideal for them.��


And with that, The Anthropocene Reviewed = 4.5 stars.

Blog: