Even though writer Jonathan Franzen and I go back a long way (i.e. the days when I attended his keynote address at the 2010 Decatur Book Festival ), it's been a while since I read of him at length*. I recently wrote a review of his book of essays The End of the End of the Earth (2018) for Destination: Books, my bookselling alter ego.
Destination: Books specializes in books about sustainability/gardening, travel and a few books about book culture. Franzen's book lives at the intersection of all three of these neighborhoods. (Our popup book stall will be at the Carter Center Freedom Farmer's market on Saturday morning, July 31, 2021. )
Franzen remains unrepentantly misanthropic as ever but in the trade paperback copy of End of the Earth, he added a new epilogue to address any doubts on what he thinks about the fragile hopes surrounding the future of the environment. He writes:
"If you care about the planet, and the people and the animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that the catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated and enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope."
* What brought Franzen back into my reading queue was George Packer's recent article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. In the excellent article, "How America Fractured into Four Parts," Packer pulls a quote from Freedom (2010), which is the book Franzen was promoting at the Decatur Book Festival.
condescension was self-incriminating.
