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The Great Derangement

Climate Change and the Unthinkable

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The Great Derangement

By: Amitav Ghosh
Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki
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About this listen

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
Earth Sciences Environment Nature & Ecology Politics & Government Conservation Great Depression History
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excellent text

This was a really interesting book. The reading was okay, but the pronunciation of all the non-Anglophone proper names were mauled, or should I say "deranged". Ironic, given some of the content of the book.

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Excellent book.

The most interesting part of this book was the third part about the politics of climate change but the whole book is very good. The book is well read.

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Remarkable insight into the roots of the climate crisi

Ghosh gives an explanation of the climate crisis, which goes way beyond the usual stories we hear. My eyes have been opened to reasons that are rarely addressed in western media. I recommend everyone who wants to dig deeper into the reasons behind where we are in the crisis today, to read this book. Especially Westerners like myself, should be more informed about the roots of our problems.

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A different slant

Incredibly rich discussion covering the role of colonialism, capitalism and arts/culture. Ponders the lack of fictional narrative. But so much more.

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