The great derangement : climate change and the unthinkable / Amitav Ghosh.

Author
Ghosh, Amitav, 1956- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
  • ©2016
Description
196 pages ; 23 cm.

Availability

Available Online

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks PN56.C612 G48 2016 Browse related items Request
    Forrestal Annex - ReservePN56.C612 G48 2016 Browse related items Request
      Lewis Library - Stacks PN56.C612 G48 2016 Browse related items Request
        Lewis Library - Stacks PN56.C612 G48 2016 Browse related items Request

          Details

          Subject(s)
          Library of Congress genre(s)
          Getty AAT genre
          Series
          • Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin family lectures [More in this series]
          • The Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin family lectures
          Summary note
          "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, makes 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."--Jacket.
          Bibliographic references
          Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-196).
          Contents
          • Stories
          • History
          • Politics.
          ISBN
          • 9780226323039 ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
          • 022632303X ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
          • 9780226526812 ((paper))
          • 022652681X ((paper))
          LCCN
          2016018232
          OCLC
          944087613
          Other standard number
          • 40026553088
          • 12874896
          Statement on language in description
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