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    The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
    Unavailable
    The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
    Unavailable
    The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
    Ebook223 pages4 hours

    The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

    By Amitav Ghosh

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 14, 2016
    ISBN9780226323176
    Unavailable
    The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
    Author

    Amitav Ghosh

    Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956. He studied at the Doon School; St. Stephens College; Delhi University; Oxford University; and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alexandria. His first job was at the Indian Express newspaper in New Delhi. He earned his doctorate at Oxford before he wrote his first novel.In February 2004 Amitav Ghosh was appointed Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. He is married with two children and lives in New York.

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    • 4/5
      Lucid, scholarly prose that doesn't use a lot of jargon even on this technical topic. The thing is, though, it is not particularly a scientific book, so it doesn't really elucidate the issue of global warming so much as the issue of literature and art ignoring global warming. Still, literature and art do have their fair share of jargon, and avoiding that shows that the author recognized his need to reach a wider audience. That said, this book had some great advantages in that it managed to address the issue without being either Euro-centric or Ameri-centric, and was not an apologia for the total innocence of non-European countries in the production of greenhouse gases that are warming our planet. The discussion about the failure of art and literature to address this mammoth problem struck home to someone who has one foot in science and one in theatre, as I recognize and bemoan the problem he expressed so eloquently. I could add that, whenever someone does manage to get a work out there that addresses an environmental issue, the audience will tend to re-interpret it as having some message about non-environmental issues, usually immigration or social justice. The only issue I take with this book is that he does some fancy footwork to dance around the elephant in the room that screams out between the lines of his own work, that of runaway population growth. And he condemns the entirely of modernity, while taking special aim at consumerism, never recognizing that we could find way to have modern medicine and other benefits without the excess consumerism. Then, after taking aim (justifiably) at excess consumerism, he denies that individuals can make any difference by changing their buying habits. I realize that there does have to be a collective action, but he fails to recognize that it has to start somewhere, and that modeling better behavior has been shown to be effective in getting those behaviors to become the norm. Overall, a satisfying, but not totally satisfying, work.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This book by Amitav Ghosh is an interesting one. The man has a lyrical manner of writing, and it was a pleasure to read the book just for the writing. Amitav Ghosh does bring in a lot of linkages between climate change - as he has experienced it, the arts, and political thought. I like the title of the book. We are deranged if we seek to deny the reality of climate change. He has contrasted the difference between the West and the East quite well. We have forgotten the old ways. Will nature force us to remember them?