The Anthropocene Reviewed

A Novelist Turns to Nonfiction

John Green built a devoted readership with young-adult novels like The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down — books known for their emotional honesty, their clever teenage narrators, and their willingness to sit with grief and longing. The Anthropocene Reviewed is something different: his first work of nonfiction, a collection of personal essays adapted and expanded from his popular podcast of the same name. The conceit is simple and strange. Green reviews various facets of the human-centered planet — the Anthropocene, our current geological age — and gives each a rating out of five stars.

What sounds like a gimmick becomes, in Green’s hands, a genuinely moving framework. The five-star scale is the joke; the essays beneath it are the heart. Across the collection he reviews everything from Halley’s Comet to Diet Dr Pepper, from the QWERTY keyboard to sunsets, from the bacterial disease that nearly killed his own friend to his struggles with anxiety and obsessive thought. The reviews are never really about the objects. They are about what those objects reveal about being alive.

The Art of the Tangent

Green is a master of the meaningful tangent. An essay nominally about scratch-and-sniff stickers becomes a reflection on memory and the way smell unlocks the past. A review of the Indianapolis 500 winds toward questions of community and belonging. A piece on the world’s largest ball of paint turns into a meditation on devotion and the human urge to make something larger than ourselves. He braids cultural history, scientific fact, literary allusion, and raw autobiography until each short essay arrives somewhere unexpected and earned.

This structure makes The Anthropocene Reviewed enormously readable. The essays are short and self-contained, so the book can be consumed in fragments or devoured whole. And because each one starts somewhere small and concrete before opening outward, there’s a constant pleasure of discovery — you never quite know where Green is going to take you, only that the journey will be worth it.

The five-star framing also does sly thematic work. By insisting on rating things as varied as the human capacity for wonder and a specific brand of soft drink on the same scale, Green gently mocks our compulsion to quantify and rank everything in a culture saturated with reviews, stars, and metrics. The conceit becomes a quiet critique of how flattened our relationship to value has grown — and a demonstration of how much more there is to say about anything once you stop reducing it to a number. The ratings are punchlines, but they’re also invitations to slow down and actually attend to the things we usually scroll past.

Memoir Beneath the Reviews

What gives the book its weight is how much of himself Green pours into it. He writes candidly about his mental health, his obsessive-compulsive disorder, the spiraling thoughts that have shadowed his life, and the work of finding reasons to stay hopeful in spite of them. He writes about his family, his fears, the COVID-19 pandemic that was unfolding as he finished the book. The collection becomes, almost incidentally, a memoir — a portrait of a particular mind trying to make sense of a chaotic, beautiful, terrifying world.

That vulnerability is the source of the book’s power. Green is not lecturing from on high; he is fumbling toward meaning alongside the reader, admitting his uncertainty even as he insists on wonder. The recurring move of the book — finding the extraordinary in the overlooked, the cosmic in the trivial — could feel twee, but Green grounds it in genuine emotional stakes. When he gives the human capacity for hope five stars, he has earned it.

The Caveats

Honesty requires acknowledging the book’s limits. Green’s sincerity is his great strength, but it occasionally tips into sentimentality, and readers allergic to earnestness may find a few essays too sweet. The episodic structure also means the quality varies — some pieces are revelatory, others slighter, and not every review lands with equal force. And listeners of the original podcast will recognize much of the material, though the print versions are expanded and refined.

These are minor reservations against a book of real warmth and insight. Even the lesser essays are pleasant company, and the strongest ones are quietly unforgettable.

Where It Sits in Green’s Work

For fans of his fiction, The Anthropocene Reviewed offers the same essential John Green — the emotional intelligence, the love of a well-placed fact, the conviction that small human moments carry enormous meaning — without the scaffolding of plot or character. Readers who connected with the grief and wonder of The Fault in Our Stars, or the unflinching portrayal of intrusive thought in Turtles All the Way Down, will recognize the same sensibility here, now turned directly on Green’s own life and on the world we share. Those who loved the quest for meaning in Paper Towns will find that search continued in essay form.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is a generous, humane book — funny, melancholy, and quietly profound. It takes the absurd premise of rating everything and uses it to ask the oldest questions: how do we live, what do we love, and how do we hold onto hope in an uncertain age? Green’s answers won’t satisfy everyone, but his willingness to keep asking, with curiosity and tenderness, makes this a deeply rewarding read.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — A warm, witty, and surprisingly moving essay collection that turns reviewing the human planet into a profound meditation on hope and wonder; occasionally sentimental, but consistently humane and rewarding.