Notes from an Apocalypse
A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
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4.0 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with the future, by the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine.
“Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.” —Esquire
We’re alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. A pandemic draws our global community to a halt. Everywhere you look there’s an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How is a person supposed to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what on earth is anybody doing about it?
Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell is consumed by these questions—and, as the father of two young children, he finds them increasingly urgent. In Notes from an Apocalypse, he crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization’s collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. What emerges is an absorbing, funny, and deeply felt book about our anxious present tense—and coming to grips with what’s ahead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The end of the world portends right-wing vigilantism and left-wing nihilism, according to this bleakly comic tour of doomsday ideologies. Consumed by fears of climate change and beset by self-criticism "my footprint is as broad and deep and indelible as my guilt" journalist O'Connell (To Be a Machine) surveys several strands of apocalyptic foreboding. He treats the reactionary, survivalist varieties including American doomsday preppers stockpiling food and ammo in anticipation of urban rioters, a real-estate developer peddling bunkers on a former South Dakota military base, and Mars-colonization enthusiasts who fondly invoke white settlers' colonization of the U.S. as pathological expressions of social paranoia, toxic patriarchy, and outright "fascism," and makes clear that his sympathies lie more with progressive doomsayers. On a camping trip with deep ecology pessimists who refute the "myth" that humans are "fundamentally distinct" from nature and welcome the climate change induced collapse of civilization, O'Connell communes with grass and sky and finds talk of human extinction "strangely cheerful." Readers who agree that the U.S. is "a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and... terminal-stage capitalism" will be equally terrified and bemused by O'Connell's musings, while those who are less credulous about narratives of ecological apocalypse will find much to dispute. The result is a wryly humorous if somewhat overwrought rumination that's more a symptom than a diagnosis of Western civilization's apocalyptic discontents.
