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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Anthropocene Reviewed, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Humanity and the Environment
Health, Disease, and Society
Community and Equality
Technology and the Internet
Summary
Analysis
Author John Green’s most recent novel, Turtles All the Way Down, came out in 2017, and after the book tour, he comes back home to Indianapolis where he likes to spend time with his wife, Sarah, and children in the woods by their house. While building a treehouse for his kids, he suddenly becomes dizzy and nauseous, necessitating a trip to the hospital. There, he learns he has labyrinthitis, an inner ear disease that will require weeks of bedrest, all while he is unable to focus on reading or TV.
John Green is best known as a fiction author, and so this introduction helps establish why his new book is a work of nonfiction. It introduces his personal story, showing how challenges like health issues have impacted his own life, which sets the stage for later when he will explore the impact that disease and health issues have had on humanity more broadly.
Active
Themes
Green began his career as a book reviewer, long before books were rated on a five-star scale, which wasn’t common for books until the arrival of Amazon user reviews. Many of the books he has written deal with mental illness, but although he is public about his own mental health struggles, at a certain point, he started to feel uncomfortable with how people assume he is just like his characters. After he recovers from labyrinthitis, he continues to make videos and a podcast with his brother, Hank, but he struggles to get back into writing, taking the longest break from it in his life.
In this passage, Green begins to explore his complicated relationship with technology. As a podcaster and video-producer, his career is deeply tied to the internet, and even as an author, his work has been affected by Amazon’s takeover of the industry. While Green doesn’t disavow the internet or technology, his use of a five-star rating system is an irreverent way of criticizing how Amazon tries to quantify the value of books and other items—things that Green believes can’t be easily quantified.
Active
Themes
In a conversation, Hank tells John that he has also noticed how reviews and ratings systems seem to be everywhere now. John proposes reviewing a goose as a joke, and Hank suggests reviewing the whole Anthropocene (current geological period). John writes more reviews in an anonymous, third-person voice, including a draft of one on Diet Dr Pepper, but Sarah suggests he should write in first person to add some of his own perspective.
Active
Themes
Green starts a podcast about reviewing the Anthropocene. Two years into the podcast, the COVID-19 pandemic begins, and John begins to turn the podcast into a book because it’s one of the few things he can do safely at the time. The project reminds him of a quote by famous children’s author Maurice Sendak about being “in love with the world.” John wants to love the world and for this book to reflect that love, even though he knows that loving the world can be a difficult thing to do.
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