I definitely recommend it, but before you buy it be sure you're interested in Scranton's core question. That is, what the humanities offer us in this perilous situation? If you're uninterested in that question, find another book.
If you're into Scranton's question, this book offers some novel thoughts and some new/compelling ways of summarizing old thoughts/history, but don't expect to be blown away. He does a good job formulating his question and using credible sources to describe the scientific and political context. And I think the points he makes about the humanities are salient.
But I think he says too little about what the humanities can do for us. The type of person most likely to buy a book with "Anthropocene" in the title already knows much of what he says about climate science, policy, and current social ills. You'd think he'd balance that with an equal amount of attention to what he views as the positive/productive promise/power/role of the humanities. Sometimes (like in Chapter Four) he does single out aspects of "the problem" that are seldom addressed and addresses them in fresh ways. But still, he spends more time describing the problem than answering his question, which is underwhelming since it's by answering his question that we can learn to die in the Anthropocene. The answer is there, but he could've done more with it, even in a volume as short as his.
It's a good book, though. And the endnotes and bibliography are very useful.
Three last critiques: first, his use of the word "anarchy" early in the book shows he doesn't know what anarchism is. Second, he doesn't address capitalism's role in this mess, a subject better dealt with in Naomi Kline's "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate" and Jason W. Moore's "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism." Third: the book is disjointed -- it jumps around a bit.
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