The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet by David Carlin

The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet Reviews

• 
  Karen

  The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet by David Carlin and Nicole Walker is a collection of conversations, disguised as short nature/personal essays, that discuss living during the Anthropocene, a term that is used to describe an era where human activity is influencing the earth. Together, Walker (who writes from the United States, more specifically Arizona and Utah) and Carlin (who writes from Australia, more specifically from his current residence of Melbourne with some passing memories of Perth) explore everything from elephants that are being born without tusks to vultures and their role to keeping the world clean to the concept of kindness, both at the personal and government levels. Yes, there is humor injected in many of these pieces, but all readers, while they may find delight in learning new facts about the environment around us, will finish the book feeling just a little bit uneasy about the world we are now living in.
• 
  Heather Taylor-Johnson

  As if we don't read about the end of our world on social media every day, don't talk about it incessantly at dinner parties and functions, don't listen to the experts and consider the stats, don't go to protests or wander into them on our way to work - here is another book about climate change to add to all of the information-overload we're trying to keep level. But this one is different because it's presented in a new and exciting way, so I'm not putting it in the pile with the others. It's a standalone work. Rather than heavy-handed speech and research-based predictions, The After-Normal is a book of creative and anecdotal musings between two academics who really sat down to experiment with eco-writing. David Carlin and Nicole Walker each write two or three pages spawned from a letter of the alphabet ('Albatross' and 'Atmosphere' / 'Rhythm' and 'Resist' / 'World' and 'Whistle') and work through their methods of 'staying with the trouble', contemplating how our now might inform our later. The short and very creative essays were clearly shared between authors during the writing, making process just as interesting as content, and it adds to our experience of making sense of their dis-ease and concern for our rapidly changing environment. The essays, though small in word-count, are big in concept. It's as if the authors are encouraging us to open up how we think so that we can begin to think better. Original, entertaining, important.
• 
  Lynn

  Yeah!
  I started reading this book immediately after I got it at AWP in Portland. I have been slowly reading it, one or two at a time, for awhile.
  I stopped for a bit, reading other things, but today I finished! Then I took "Igloo" to my CNF class to read, ask questions about, etc.
  My favorite thing was being able to hear Nicole's and David's voices in my head as I read.
  I liked how the topics were so various, though of course there are many threads running through the book.
  The essays are meditations and speculations and little well-researched nuggets. Many moments of reflection, for me, and also some great essays that illuminate our precarious status on this "after-normal" planet.
  
• 
  Valentine

  I love this concept. I felt this collection of essays was for me, middle class people who are well off and weighed down by the anxiety of a changing world. I give it four stars, because I wished this could be more accessible. I wish I could give this to my dad or my sister, someone outside of academia and craft writing, who could learn more about the wonder and horrors of this changing world. I think this book did something important for me: it made me feel heard, made my anxieties feel seen, and gave me new ideas on how to interact with the world around me.
• 
  McKinnon Catherine

  This is a witty and thoughtful look at living in a time of climate crisis. The essays are short and able to be read in small bites or one long sitting. Carlin and Walker take turns to comment on topics that impact on their daily lives. Both are insightful observers of what it is like to live in a damaged world. While they are playful there is a serious intention to the work, and there is encouragement to be proactive in facing the climate related challenges ahead.
• 
  Steve

  It's fine, but not nearly so cool as I hoped. I was expecting explicit and concrete discussion of details about how our lives are going to change as the climate gets less livable, and there was a little of that, but far less than I'd hoped.
• 
  Maggie Millus

  Reflective essays on our changing environment. The essays are arranged in alphabetical order, they are serious, ecological, political, personal, and a compelling call for immediate action on Climate Change.
• 
  Alan

  This is a surprisingly, sensational, circumnavigational, construct. Ok, I admit that I started this before I finished but I'm up to K for Krab and now I'll add, this is also good for a laugh and you will understand that K for "curb" that is Kerb,a real down under but, K for crab will never be a real U.S. If you followed that last sentence you will love the rest of this book which is superlative.