This book is a collection of essays from John Green on a variety of topics from the modern era, including the QWERTY keyboard, Canadian geese, Super Mario Kart, teddy bears, and Haley’s Comet. Many of the essays are biographical in nature, so this book often feels like a memoir. Each essay also includes a 5-star rating, so they act as mini reviews of the anthropocene, which is the period of time during which humanity has become a major force of change across the entire planet. And now I’m going to review this book of reviews (The Anthropocene Reviewed… reviewed).
The writing throughout is beautiful, even moving at times, and most of the topics are interesting. A lot of the content was written during the height of the COVID pandemic, so it’s a very relatable tale. The only problem is that the stories are all fairly short and disconnected, and even just a few days after finishing the book, many of them have already faded from memory. It reminds me of Bill Bryson books: delightful while you’re reading, but ultimately forgettable.
That said, a few of the essays are gems that stand out enough to be memorable:
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Diet Dr Pepper. A fun essay about how Dr Pepper was developed, and how it has a purely engineered taste that does not exist anywhere in nature. I don’t drink soda, and try to avoid food “products,” but I have to admit this essay gave me an appreciation for the ability of human beings to create wholly new tastes.
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Lascaux Cave Paintings. In 1940, a man followed his dog into what would turn out to be the entrance to a cave filled with prehistoric paintings from around 17,000 to 20,000 years ago. This essay got me to reflect on how much, and how little, humanity has changed in all that time. We can still recognize many of the animals in the paintings, but not all (perhaps because some of them went extinct?), and the hand stencils look just like the ones kids do today when tracing their hand on paper.
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The Yips. This is a term for when an athlete or performer suddenly loses the ability to perform, such as a pitcher suddenly losing their ability to hit the strike zone, or a tennis player losing the ability to hit a serve. It’s a combination of psychological problems, physical tremors, anxiety, and losing confidence, and it has ended many careers. What a weird and fascinating concept.
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Academic Decathlon. An essay about participating in academic decathlons, which are competitions between schools that tests students’ abilities across ten different disciplines: math, science, speech, art, economics, and so on. The essay stood out mostly for a lovely discussion of friendships, as well as this quote:
I never excelled academically, and took some pride in “not fulfilling my potential,” in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn that I didn’t actually have that much potential.
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Auld Lang Syne. This is the name of the song we all sing at New Years. This essay goes through the history of the song, the themes of remembering old friends and shared experiences, and how this sort of thing transcends time. It also features a beautiful quote:
When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”
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Monopoly. This essay talks about the history of the board game Monopoly. I learned two new things: first, the game was originally invented by a woman, and later, the game design was copied by a man who made lots of money from it (and ultimately sold it to Hasbro), without crediting the original creator. Second, I learned that the original game had two rules: one set that is similar to the game we all play today, where you try to bankrupt the other players, and a second set where you work together with other players to all make as much money as possible. The game tried to impart the lesson that cooperation is better than competition, but the competitive version became more popular, and ultimately, won out.
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Bonneville Salt Flats. This essay focuses on the salt flats in Utah, but the part that stood out is the idea of third things: those items in the world that couples look at and experience together, such as art, or travel, or kids, or pets. So much of the joy in life is sharing third things with someone you love.
After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, “We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing.”
