The Great Derangement

Climate Change and the Unthinkable

By: Amitav Ghosh

Narrated by: Shridhar Solanki

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

What a shame!

Fascinating book but SO badly read. Most names mangled, and many words even. “Entrances” written as a verb, read as a noun. Can only imagine Ghosh with his head in his hands if he heard it.

Fascinating

Original and insightful look into the potential future of our world. I enjoyed this one!

Must Listen

An excellent rendition of one of the most important books of the 21st century. Listen to it.

Wonderful book & narrator is the best

This is a brilliant book, and I like the narrator's delivery so much that i'm looking for another book narrated by him.

Not an easy read

Too many run ons which at times make it hard to follow. Can be a little dry at times.