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The End of the End of the Earth is a collection of Jonathan Franzen's essays and speeches from the past five years, in which he grapples with the most important and heated ethical subjects of the day: environmentalism, capitalism, wealth inequality, race, technology and the role of art. He challenges us to ask difficult questions: What is our civic responsibility in the face of climate change, the greatest ever threat to our planet and species? Does technology give us a sense of control or community or is it stripping these from us? Above all, in these essays, Franzen asks us to care—about causes great and small, with subjects as big as our planet and specific as a rare species of birds. These essays are in praise of empathy, and of the beauty and power of nature and art.
This slim but powerful book is Franzen at his best, incisive, persuasive and compassionate.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 13, 2018 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780385693110
- File size: 195353 KB
- Duration: 06:46:59
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Narrator Robert Petkoff gives voice to the edgy, eclectic, and energetic ideas of National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen. Petkoff hits the difficult balance between being ironic and earnest that is so characteristic of the author's essays. Petkoff races through the complicated, interesting sentences while at the same making sure that we keep track of their meaning with precise enunciation. Listeners are treated to an intellectual persona that sounds like one would expect of Franzen himself. For fans of his fiction and nonfiction alike, this is a title one can dip in and out of on long walks or slow Sunday afternoons. Petkoff makes sure this is an entertaining, as well as contemplative, experience. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine -
July 16, 2018
A compulsive need to find order, and a love of birding, represent two of the central threads of this stimulating collection of previously published essays from novelist Franzen (Purity). In the opening essay, “The Essay in Dark Times,” Franzen self-identifies as “what people in the world of birding call a lister,” which makes him “morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it.” Throughout the essays that follow, Franzen muses about writing, Edith Wharton, climate change, Antarctica, the photographs of Sarah Stolfa, and birds, always birds. Some of his opinions have already stoked controversy: In “A Rooting Interest,” he comments on Wharton’s privileged position amid New York City’s social elite, and observes she had “one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty.” In “Save What You Love,” he takes the Audubon Society to task for naming climate change as the greatest threat to birds, when “no individual bird death can be definitively attributed” to it, while statistics indicate that picture windows and outdoor cats kill three billion birds annually. Whether observing the eerie beauty of Antarctica (“far from having melted,” he reports) or dispensing “Ten Rules for the Novelist,” Franzen makes for an entertaining, sometimes prickly, but always quotable companion.
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