Stories are personal.

MANY YEARS AGO, when I was a college dropout with bad credit, having defaulted on my student loans, I worked briefly as a phone psychic. 

Nice way to start a review on 2 books urging action on the climate situation.  What follows is a trenchant and unsentimental deconstruction of the presuppositions held by the authors.  The reviewer does this in accord with the his own meta-presuppositions.

The stories we tell ourselves matter. As beings whose social existence is structured by symbolic reasoning, we comprehend our lives through collectively-agreed-upon narratives about what is important, what to attend to, what reality itself is and means. These narratives undergird our politics, inform our notions of identity, and give shape to our desires. They tell us what is possible and what is not, what is known and what is inconceivable, what must be true and what cannot be. It is therefore essential that we always keep testing our narratives against reality, and always be willing to edit, revise, or even wholly rewrite them in light of new information.

He devotes the front of the piece to tell the story of the personal experience that brought him to this  meta-take, and spends the rest of the time exposing how both writers forgo such reflection and articulate narratives that don’t square with issues raised in some of the signifying moments of his life.  In doing so, he issues an interesting challenge concerning who, if anyone, can speak practically about what we are facing.