The World Without Us

4/5 stars.
Overall, I found the book to be quite an enjoyable read for me. It's clearly well researched, written in an easy to read style(not necessarily a bad thing or criticism, just a fact), and it gives underlying depressive and yet hopeful feeling. While reading I had a pretty constant feeling of sadness, anger and resignation, but I was still hopeful that the scars we inflicted on the earth would eventually heal. That's something that the book conveyed well.

Its premise is essentially a long string of “what ifs”, and each chapter explores a different aspect of how the things in our world could change if we, humans, disappeared all at once. The book explores that question, and its variations, from historical, scientific, as well as speculative lense.

For example: What would happen to our infrastructure if we disappeared?
Alan Weisman usually begins to answer the question by first providing the history of that particular object or thing, then he talks about its significance, before diving into the possible future of it without us.

Those are the good things about the book, but I have a few criticisms as well. The first one is that the book sometimes feels kinda like an extended article, which, well, it is. In acknowledgments, the author says that he wrote an article regarding Chernobyl and its wildlife - we also get that segment in the book, and that he was asked by Josie, an editor from Discover Magazine, “What happen if humans disappeared everywhere?”.

My second criticism is that Alan isn't really good at explaining things if the reader doesn't already have some prior knowledge of what he's talking about. If you know what he's talking about, you'll feel engaged with the text, but if you don't, then you'll feel confused. And you might just put the book down to go and research the thing for yourself.

And my third criticism, albeit a minor one, is that the first chapter kinda lies to its reader. We are told that we'll explore the previously mentioned question- “would happen if humans disappeared everywhere?”, and also how religion plays into all of that. It makes us think that it'll be a really important and significant part of the book. And it's not. We do get a short chapter at the very end, the last chapter, but that's it. Personally, I'm glad that there indeed wasn't any major discussion about religion - there's only so much of it that I can stomach, but it's still worth mentioning that it isn't really discussed despite the author making it seem like it would be.