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Staff Pick
Roy Scranton is a gifted, intrepid writer, and these essays are mesmerizing despite their dire themes (climate change, war, violence). We’re Doomed. Now What? is an elegiac book that grieves as it presses forward. Recommended By Lucinda G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The time we’ve been thrown into 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 ground-breaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”
Review
“Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster...This is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker.” NAOMI KLEIN, AUTHOR OF THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: CAPITALISM VS. THE CLIMATE
Review
“Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book.” ELIZABETH KOLBERT, PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR OF THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY
About the Author
Roy Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, and co-editor of Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. He grew up in Oregon, dropped out of college, and spent several years wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army. He served from 2002 to 2006, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq. After leaving the Army he earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, then completed his PhD in English at Princeton.