The New York Times - John Williams
…Roy Scranton writes with angry passion about the various ways we fail to confront reality…[His] pieces about war (an Army veteran, he served a 14-month deployment in Iraq)…ground his philosophy, and his prose, in experience. He writes clearly and convincingly about the emotional, existential challenges that attracted him to war, and how he was changed by the time he returned home…Scranton at his best is an incisive dispenser of tough love.
Publishers Weekly
04/16/2018
Novelist and nonfiction author Scranton (Learning to Die in the Anthropocene) struggles to provide satisfying responses to his titular question in this jumbled collection. His premise is that an era of environmental and political catastrophe already exists, and the only meaningful next step is to “let our current civilization die” and find a “new order of meaning.” Specifics of what that new order looks like, beyond a repudiation of consumer capitalism, are left abstract. Scranton organizes his essays under thematic headings: “Climate & Change,” “War & Memory,” and “Violence & Communion.” The climate essays cover, among other topics, the melting of the Arctic ice cap and the possibility of a Texas mega-hurricane, and express pessimism about the possibility of mitigating global warming. The war section covers Scranton’s memories of patrolling Iraq as an Army private, attending antiwar rallies after his return to the U.S., returning to Baghdad as a civilian to witness the 2014 elections, and his concerns about the dangers of fetishizing American power. In the “Violence” essays, Scranton draws connections between victims of war, terror, and police shootings, decrying social hierarchies that value some lives over others. Sometimes astute, sometimes meandering, Scranton’s latest work is heavy on fatalism and light on focus. (July)
From the Publisher
Praise for We're Doomed. Now What?
"[Scranton] writes clearly and convincingly about the emotional, existential challenges that attracted him to war, and how he was changed by the time he returned home."
—The New York Times
"Readers brave enough to pick it [We're Doomed. Now What?] up will discover the direct and unvarnished commentary it promises . . . Based on its title, some readers might expect We're Doomed to function as an unremitting rant against the people and agencies actively destroying the environment. But Scranton is a more subtle and versatile writer than that. While he has many disturbing factoids about climate change at his fingertips—and deploys them with precision and accuracy—the essays benefit from the author’s tendency toward self-deprecation."
—Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club
"Roy Scranton is one of the most gifted writers of his generation."
—Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
"Roy Scranton is our Jeremiah of the anthropocene and a brutally honest chronicler of American violence in all its forms. His message is as urgent as it is discomfiting. Hear him."
—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of America's War for the Greater East: A Military History
"These are thoughtful, powerful essays from the extremes of geography and experience. Not easy reading, but electric and worthwhile."
—Mark Greif, author of Against Everything and The Age of the Crisis of Man
"Taken together, these essays—dark, often beautiful, frequently scholarly, always gripping—seek to accurately describe things we might prefer not be described. The work is difficult, noble in intention, and brilliant in execution."
—The Gazette
"Scranton’s book isn’t really about the science of global warming. It’s a deeply felt meditation on what it all means for us philosophically and ethically."
—WPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge
"Scranton skillfully integrates literature and philosophy into his own thoughts, creating multilayered writings that beg to be read slowly and carefully by a reader willing to pay attention for a steady length of time. Eye-opening and honest, these essays are like receiving a terminal diagnosis from a specialist while still leaving a margin of hope on the sides."
—Shelf Awareness
"A realistic, if depressing, look at the modern world and how readers can survive the new environment humans have created."
—Library Journal
"Scranton's warnings must be heeded."
—Kirkus Reviews
"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."
—Powell's Books, Staff Pick
Praise for Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
“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
“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
Praise for War Porn
“One of the best and most disturbing war novels in years.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A view of the American military unlike anything else written about Iraq or Afghanistan . . . A guided meditation on Iraq certain to force long overdue introspection on how we think about the war, those who fought it and the Americans and Iraqis it affected.”
—New Republic
“Forceful and unsettling.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Searingly honest . . . This examination of the tragedy of what happened in Iraq reaches out to touch of all us. A brilliant literary achievement.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy
Kirkus Reviews
2018-05-01
Essays on war and the "eve of what may be the human world's greatest catastrophe."Novelist and journalist Scranton (English/Notre Dame Univ.; War Porn, 2016, etc.) collects essays and talks, most previously published, that primarily cover climate change, serving with the Army in the Middle East, race, and contemporary war literature. The author is clearly frustrated and angry, and he is doing his level best to face the doom and gloom. As he writes in the title essay, "we stand today on a precipice of annihilation that Nietzsche could not have even imagined." In fact, he admits, "it's probably already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming." At this moment of crisis, we must use our "human drive to make meaning…[it's] our "only salvation." In "Arctic Ghosts," Scranton recounts a 2015 cruise he took in Canada. He writes about John Franklin's 1845 failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Today, his cruise succeeded: "I was overtaken by the realization that what I'd come to see was already gone." Our planet had warmed "beyond anything civilization has ever seen." In "Rock Scissors Paper," which he describes as a "Borgesian bastard," the author riffs about our new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, "characterized by the advent of the human species as a geological force." No one, he writes, "intended this, and we seem to be incapable of preventing it." In "Anthropocene City," Scranton chronicles his tour of heavily polluted Galveston Bay, "so full of PCBs, pesticides, dioxin, and petrochemicals that fishing is widely restricted." When he writes about his personal involvement in war, it comes almost as a relief. In the book's longest essay, the powerful "Back to Baghdad," he returned as a journalist: "They stayed, I left. But while I may have left Iraq, Iraq hadn't left me."Despite the inevitable repetitions, Scranton's warnings must be heeded…again and again.
