Excerpts-

• From the cover From the Introduction
   
  When I reviewed books, “I” was never in the review. I imagined myself as a disinterested observer writing from outside. My early re­views of Diet Dr Pepper and Canada geese were similarly written in the nonfictional version of third-person omniscient narration. After Sarah read them, she pointed out that in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants. She explained that  when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of mem­oir—here’s what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop. I’d written 1,500 words about Diet Dr Pepper without once mentioning my abiding and deeply personal love of Diet Dr Pepper.
  
  Around the same time, as I began to regain my sense of balance, I reread the work of my friend and mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who’d died a few months earlier. She’d once written, “For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That’s pretty much all the info u need.” My attention had become so fractured, and my world had become so loud, that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was paying attention to. But when I put myself into the reviews as Sarah suggested, I felt like for the first time in years, I was at least trying to pay attention to what I pay attention to.
  
  •••
   
  This book started out as a podcast, where I tried to chart some of the contradictions of human life as I experience it—how we can be so com­passionate and so cruel, so persistent and so quick to despair. Above all, I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are power­ful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.
  
  I also wanted to write about some of the places where my small life runs into the large forces of the Anthropocene. In early 2020, after two years of writing the podcast, an exceptionally large force appeared in the form of a novel coronavirus. I began then to write about the only thing I could write about. Amid the crisis—and writing to you from April of 2021, I am still amid it—I find much to fear and lament. But I also see humans working together to share and distribute what we collectively learn, and I see people working together to care for the sick and vulner­able. Even separated, we are bound up in each other. As Sarah told me, there are no observers; only participants.

About the Author-

• John Green is the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of books including Looking for Alaska, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down. His books have received many accolades, including a Printz Medal, a Printz Honor, and an Edgar Award. John has twice been a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and was selected by TIME magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. He is also the writer and host of the critically acclaimed podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed. With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educational channel Crash Course. He lives with his family in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can visit John online at johngreenbooks.com.

Reviews-

• This audiobook, narrated faithfully by its author, offers a complex and insightful look at the various human experiences that shape us. John Green (THE FAULT IN OUR STARS) delivers impassioned reviews on a five-star scale of Diet Dr. Pepper, Canada geese, Halley's Comet, the Indy 500, and several other miscellaneous experiences, connecting each to his personal life and to current social issues. Green's narration flows conversationally, gentle through moments full of heartache that shifts seamlessly to whimsical delight during upbeat sections. Listening to the audiobook is essential to the full experience, as Green sings at one moment and plays the last recorded song of a now extinct Hawaiian bird in another. A beautiful and poignant performance. A.K.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
• 

  Starred review from June 7, 2021
  YA novelist Green (Turtles All the Way Down) makes his adult debut with this perfectly calibrated collection that reviews and rates various aspects of the current epoch. Taking on the style of a Yelp review, Green assigns a five-star rating to each topic he covers. “Our Capacity for Wonder,” for example, gets three and a half stars (due to humans’ general lack of attentiveness), while Diet Dr. Pepper gets four—Green loves the drink, but finds consuming it feels like “committing a sin.” His review of the video game Mario Kart gives way to a discussion of privilege and a consideration of the role videos games played in the male friendships of his youth: “We didn’t need to talk about Mario Kart, but we needed Mario Kart to have an excuse to be together,” while CNN gets two stars for its failure to report “background information that allows us to understand why the news is happening.” Each short review is rich with meaning and filled with surprises—”Sunsets,” for example, draws on several poems to ask “what should we do about the clichéd beauty” of a setting sun— and together, they amount to a resonant paean to hard-won hope. Green’s legions of fans will be delighted.

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