
The Great Derangement
Climate Change and the Unthinkable
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Narrated by:
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Shridhar Solanki
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By:
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Amitav Ghosh
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 PublishingListeners also enjoyed...




















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Fascinating
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What a shame!
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Must Listen
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Wonderful book & narrator is the best
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Not an easy read
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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.
Interesting narrative that falls apart at the end
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Brilliant and inspirational.
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An important book.
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Fascinating Important and Sad
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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.
Deranged
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