The Anthropocene Reviewed Study Guide

John Green was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and grew up in Orlando, Florida. He attended a boarding school in Alabama and went on to study English and religious studies at Kenyon College. After initially considering divinity school and working as a student chaplain in a hospital, Green eventually took a job as a book reviewer in Chicago. He published his first young adult novel, Looking for Alaska, in 2005, and over the next few years he became one of the world’s bestselling novelists, with The Fault in Our Stars becoming a publishing sensation in 2012 and getting adapted into a film in 2014. In 2007, Green launched the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers with his younger brother, Hank, and he would continue to collaborate with his brother on videos, podcasts, and other projects. In 2018, Green started a podcast called The Anthropocene Reviewed, which would become the basis for a book in 2021. Green lives with his wife and two children in Indianapolis.

The Anthropocene is a term used to describe the period of geological history in which humans have been the primary force causing the planet to change. Although geologists almost unanimously agree that humans have had a large impact on the planet, there is still controversy about when to define the beginning of the Anthropocene—or whether it deserves to be a new era at all. One of the most commonly proposed starting points is the Industrial Revolution, when new developments in technology led to profound increases in pollution, marking the start of modern human-driven climate change. Others have proposed other start dates, such as the beginning of the Great Acceleration (an exponential increase in planet-changing human activities in the 20th century) or the development of the atomic bomb in 1945. Green’s focus in the book is on user reviews. The primary inspiration for these reviews is to parody the user reviews on the e-commerce company Amazon, which launched in 1995 as a website to sell books and went on to become the second-largest company in the world. Green is far from the first to criticize Amazon, which throughout its controversial history has been accused of monopolistic business practices, worker exploitation, censorship, product fraud, privacy violations, and more.

Green’s book combines memoir with popular science. It shares its wide-ranging focus with Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Green cites Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as one of his favorite books, and it is a memoir that similarly deals with the wonders of nature. Green frequently quotes poetry and song lyrics throughout the book. Some of his favorites, which have influenced his writing and which he references directly in this book, include e e cummings (“who are you,little i”), Emily Dickinson (“The Hope”), Robert Burns (“Auld Lang Syne”), Kaveh Akbar (Calling a Wolf a Wolf), the Mountain Goats (Tallahassee), and Will Oldham (Viva Last Blues). As a resident of Indianapolis, Green takes an interest in local writers, and one of the most prominent writers from Indianapolis was Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five). Like Green, Vonnegut also wrote in praise of Indianapolis’s good qualities. Although it is a work of nonfiction, The Anthropocene Reviewed is also in conversation with Green’s earlier books like The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, which similarly deal with issues of illness and mental health, aiming to portray illnesses realistically rather than as symbols or metaphors.