We're Doomed. Now What?
Essays on War and Climate Change
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day in 15 insightful, honest essays on war, climate change, and violence.
Our moment is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what?
We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his groundbreaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and nonfiction author Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene) struggles to provide satisfying responses to his titular question in this jumbled collection. His premise is that an era of environmental and political catastrophe already exists, and the only meaningful next step is to "let our current civilization die" and find a "new order of meaning." Specifics of what that new order looks like, beyond a repudiation of consumer capitalism, are left abstract. Scranton organizes his essays under thematic headings: "Climate & Change," "War & Memory," and "Violence & Communion." The climate essays cover, among other topics, the melting of the Arctic ice cap and the possibility of a Texas mega-hurricane, and express pessimism about the possibility of mitigating global warming. The war section covers Scranton's memories of patrolling Iraq as an Army private, attending antiwar rallies after his return to the U.S., returning to Baghdad as a civilian to witness the 2014 elections, and his concerns about the dangers of fetishizing American power. In the "Violence" essays, Scranton draws connections between victims of war, terror, and police shootings, decrying social hierarchies that value some lives over others. Sometimes astute, sometimes meandering, Scranton's latest work is heavy on fatalism and light on focus.
