The Great Derangement

Climate Change and the Unthinkable

By: Amitav Ghosh

Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability - at the level of literature, history, and politics - to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence - a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.

©2016 Amitav Ghosh (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing

Interesting narrative that falls apart at the end

Good: narrator. Solanki has a great voice that conveyed a frustrating topic (climate change and the author’s views of the novel’s complicity) in a way that made it easier to think through instead of immediately going to the offensive, which readers are likely to do.

Also Good: loved the history, especially since it’s not likely most readers in the west know anything about India and other countries in the area the author writes about.

Still good: the author wove his stories within his narrative about climate change in an attention sustaining way. I was ready to give it four or five stars, and then…

It all falls apart: the appeal to religion. What a joke. Pope Francis? The author gushes on the creep (and Popes are nothing less) as if he is the second coming of Christ. “Oh, look at all this talk about the marginalized in comparison with the Paris Accord.” He’s right about Paris, but the Catholic Church could help the poor if it wanted to by disseminating its wealth. Religion cares about the poor and marginalized about as much as the oil companies care. Religion and the State require each other in the same way that Capitalism and the State do. While individual religious people might be an effective part of solutions, the leadership is, as always, spewing platitudes because they know nothing will come of them. Their power will remain intact. Don’t wait for religious leaders to guide you. That will get less than nothing accomplished.

Fascinating

Original and insightful look into the potential future of our world. I enjoyed this one!

What a shame!

Fascinating book but SO badly read. Most names mangled, and many words even. “Entrances” written as a verb, read as a noun. Can only imagine Ghosh with his head in his hands if he heard it.

Must Listen

An excellent rendition of one of the most important books of the 21st century. Listen to it.

Wonderful book & narrator is the best

This is a brilliant book, and I like the narrator's delivery so much that i'm looking for another book narrated by him.

Not an easy read

Too many run ons which at times make it hard to follow. Can be a little dry at times.

Brilliant and inspirational.

It's got me full speed ahead on a cli-fi project. I love his acknowledgment, with this work, that it is a responsibility of artists to imagine a better future and provide an impetus for seeking solutions.

An important book.

A vital book on the relationship between art, fiction, and climate change. It also includes important historical aspects on climate change and the rise of fossil fuel. It's a vital read for understanding our world..

Fascinating Important and Sad

Ghosh ties together some of the pieces that are often missing in current discussions of the climate disaster: imperialism and power. Its a roundabout way of explaining that the masters of the world, for whom inequality is so important ("the haves") will resist to the death any sort of equity in suffering. They will allow the former colonial states ("the have nots") to burn and drown or both, first.

Deranged

This book has two ideas. First that the reality of climate change is so intensely bad that humans can not absorb or accept this reality. This is analogous to the holocaust in the 1940's or the first response to a terminal cancer diagnosis. The second idea is that writers (and other thought leaders) have a singular responsibility to overcome this derangement and address the issue of climate catastrophe to overcome this derangement and call to action.

It was not clear to me why this took six hours.
It did not seem to me this book is even in alignment with its own main points.
Perhap some will be moved by this form of argument to action, if so, good.

I would instead recommend "The Uninhabitable Earth" - particularly in Audible.