One of those landmark books that significantly influenced my worldview. Highly recommended! ( )

I believe the climate crisis is real, that it is caused by humans, and that we urgently need to change our lifestyles to prevent the destruction of the planet. It's important that I say these things explicitly and up front so that nobody interprets my dislike of this book as some sort of climate change denial.

As I was reading this book I had the strongest feeling of sitting in a boring college lecture, one inside of those big halls with stadium seating and the professor monologuing at you in the front. Well, when I get to the last page and see the acknowledgements, lo and behold, he states that the book is based on a series of lectures that he gave. Zero surprise here. None.

We are decades away from the days when bad writing was the price we paid for reading non-fiction. The author should either have stepped up and done the necessary work of turning these lectures into an engaging book, or just condensed them into a 5 minute TED Talk and left it at that. ( )

It was all interesting until the author realized he had no solutions for the problems he presented and punted to religion. More than punting, he gushed over Pope Francis and claimed religious groups would save us. Are those the religious groups that fight against women's rights? LGBT+ rights? Appealing to a Pope who is complicit with child sexual abuse, among other things, is disgusting. If you read it, the first part gives you some things to think about, which is why it still gets three stars. As I come to my senses, I will likely make it a two. Though my conscious is telling me it should be a 1 just for this stupid stance. ( )

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? ( )

The Great Derangement is Amitav Ghosh's attempt to understand why we make such terrible decisions when it comes to dealing with climate change. His thesis, if it can be summed up, is that both capitalism and colonialism created global inequities of power and wealth that would need to be dismantled for climate action to succeed, at least without compromising the freedom-and-progress narrative that legitimizes them.

I enjoyed the book greatly and his writing is beyond gorgeous, but I'm not entirely persuaded. I think, in sections, he is on to something: Part 1, dealing with literary fiction, which he suggests as having excluded the improbable as a valid subject for exploration and therefore is poorly equipped for dealing with an era in which the improbable has become a daily occurrence, was compelling. I couldn't help but think of counter-examples while I was writing ([a:David Mitchell|6538289|David Mitchell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1409248688p2/6538289.jpg], [b:Fifteen Dogs|23129923|Fifteen Dogs|André Alexis|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1447727528s/23129923.jpg|42677741], [b:The Humans|16130537|The Humans|Matt Haig|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1353739654s/16130537.jpg|21955852], [b:Not Dark Yet|24796166|Not Dark Yet|Berit Ellingsen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429097911s/24796166.jpg|44432239], etc.) so I don't know if I think it's as universal as he states, but I do think there's truth to the claim that literary fiction deals so closely with daily minutiae and interior states that something like a hundred-year-storm or drought would be difficult to turn into a literary work.

But then Part 3, in which he deals with politics, is not as compelling. His analysis of global politics and inequities I think is quite accurate, but his inability to see activism on behalf of identities as being grounded in collectives rather than the individual person was frankly strange (there's a lot of women, Ghosh).

[b:Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life|10300309|Living in Denial Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life|Kari Marie Norgaard|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1367782919s/10300309.jpg|15202275] and [b:Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change|18594475|Don't Even Think About It Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change|George Marshall|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1405300995s/18594475.jpg|26340874] were both better, more scientific, and more quantitative explorations of personal and societal (rather than economic) climate denialism, and made more compelling overall arguments. That said, Ghosh's critiques of western/american exceptionalism and the arguments that give their empires legitimacy was fantastic and he made a lot of excellent points. Maybe someone else can collect the data in support of his arguments. ( )