635 Darwin and Cataclysmic Change (with Allen MacDuffie) | My Last Book with Adelle Waldman

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

Books, Arts, History

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2024

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dealing with reality can be difficult enough, but when the nature of that reality is completely overturned - as it is in a case like the climate crisis - we're left with a feeling of intense unease. What does this mean for us? How can we absorb a revelation that threatens to undermine everything we believe about ourselves and our place in the universe? In this episode, Jacke talks to Allen MacDuffie about his new book Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, which examines how writers like George Eliot and H.G. Wells dealt with a post-Darwinian world, and asks whether those examples might help readers cope with today's cataclysmic problems. PLUS novelist Adelle Waldman (Help Wanted) stops by to discuss her choice for the last book she will ever read. Enjoy this episode? You might enjoy some of these from our archive: Upton Sinclair and the Muckraking Novelist (with Adelle Waldman) George Eliot 330 Middlemarch (with Yang Huang) Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	Cheese It has arrived. A cheesy new snack that's packed full of intense cheesy flavor.
0:20.0	Get your hands on a pack in stores now.
0:25.0	Fancy a cheese hit!
0:27.0	Hey music lover!
0:30.0	Hey music lover, it's time for some Tom Bona jamming to some yot rock
0:37.3	Gone old school with some beep,
0:40.7	bingo 90 if you like your tunes more vibing playing can be exciting till you feel the need for
0:47.2	dancing.
0:48.2	Here we go!
0:49.2	I've heard drum and bass!
0:51.2	Oh just 110 pounds.
0:53.7	Tom Bola!
0:54.9	Open for fun.
0:56.9	Terms apply 18 plus. Please play safely.
1:00.3	Hello, we begin today with a quote from Annie Dillard in her 1974 classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
1:08.0	Evolution, she writes, loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
1:18.0	The words are simple, the concept clear, but you don't believe it, do you?"
1:24.0	Charles Darwin said something similar in the origin of species.
1:29.0	Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life or more difficult, at
1:36.0	least I have found it so, than to constantly bear this conclusion in mind." End quote.
1:43.0	Those two quotes are at the start of Alan McDuffie's new book and they are at the heart of his book's project.
	...

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