OK so this is probably my fault. I love the writing of Jonathan Franzen and rate every novel 5 stars, so when I heard he had a book out about climate change I couldn't wait. I should have done. This isn't strictly a book. It is a pamphlet with a hard cover. One quarter of the pamphlet is the foreword. Another quarter is the text of an interview with Wieland Freund. This leaves around 3,000 words for the meat of Franzen's rant. That is about ten pages of a normal Franzen novel. Was this really worth a book? Should I have saved the carbon burned in printing this book and delivering it to my door? I think perhaps I should. I don't disagree with Franzen's arguments by the way. He is a persuasive writer after all. He seeks to convince us that the battle to save the planet from climate change is lost. He's probably right. He believes that our strident campaigns to cut carbon emissions are doomed to failure, and are anyway too late. We need to manage our expectations, he says, for a world that is basically screwed. He argues for hope while dashing our hopes. But hey, carry on cutting carbon, he tells us, it can't hurt.
So there we have it. This is the kind of rant you might have heard from a man in the pub. Pithy. Well written. But it's an opinion piece - not a book. Franzen could have helped the planet by sending this out as a free email. Meanwhile I'm still waiting for the next novel. Oh well. I still love The Corrections.

What If We Stopped Pretending?
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The climate change is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.
‘If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.’
The honesty and realism of Jonathan Franzen’s writings on climate have been widely denounced and just as widely celebrated. Here, in his definitive statement on the subject, Franzen confronts the world’s failure to avert destabilising climate change and takes up the question: Now what?
©2021 Jonathan Franzen (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
- Listening Length49 minutes
- Audible release date21 January 2021
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB08SWJXG81
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Product details
Listening Length | 49 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Jonathan Franzen |
Narrator | Christopher Ragland |
Audible.com.au Release Date | 21 January 2021 |
Publisher | Fourth Estate |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B08SWJXG81 |
Best Sellers Rank | 112,752 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) 236 in Literary Essays 589 in Environment 797 in Nature & Ecology (Audible Books & Originals) |
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John Ironmonger
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A Short (VERY short) Rant about Climate Change
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 January 2021Verified Purchase
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