[Vision2020] Amitav Ghosh: "Climate Change and the Unthinkable"

[Debi Smith]

Thanks, Ted!

Debi R-S


On 5/5/2017 7:53 PM, Ted Moffett wrote:
> http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo22265507.html
>
> 176 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2016
> Berlin Family Lectures 
> <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/series/BFLS.html>
> Paper $15.00ISBN: 9780226526812Will Publish July 2017 Not for sale in 
> India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, 
> Burma/Myanmar, and Sri Lanka
> Cloth $22.00ISBN: 9780226323039Published September 2016 Not for sale 
> in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, 
> Burma/Myanmar, and Sri Lanka
> E-book $15.00About E-books 
> <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo22265507.html#> 
> ISBN: 9780226323176Published September 2016 Not for sale in India, 
> Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldive Islands, Bangladesh, Burma/Myanmar, 
> and Sri Lanka
> 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… Read More 
> <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo22265507.html#>
>
> 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.
> ---------------------------------------
> Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
>
>
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