Notes from an apocalypse : a personal journey to the end of the world and back /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Doubleday, [2020]Edition: First editionDescription: 252 pages ; 22 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780385543002
- 038554300X
- 9780525435310
- 052543531X
- 613.6/9 23
- GF86 .O36 2020
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Nonfiction | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | 613.69 OCONNEL (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610022370154 | |||
Standard Loan | Hayden Library Adult Nonfiction | Hayden Library | Book | 613.69/OCONNEL (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610022325398 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
"Harrowing, tender-hearted, and funny as hell" --Jenny Offill
"Fascinating...Oddly uplifting" --The Economist
"Smart, funny, irreverent, and philosophically rich" -- Wall Street Journal
By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine , an absorbing, deeply felt book about our anxious present tense--and coming to grips with the future
We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny. Old postwar alliances are crumbling. 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 does it mean to have children--nothing if not an act of hope--in such unsettled times? 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 himself, 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 those places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited--real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he comes to a resolution, while offering readers a unique window into our contemporary imagination.
Both investigative and deeply personal, Notes from an Apocalypse is an affecting, humorous, and surprisingly hopeful meditation on our present moment. With insight, humanity, and wit, O'Connell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isn't the end of the world?
Tribulations -- Preparations -- Luxury survival -- Bolthole -- Off-world colony -- Under the hide -- The final resting place of the future -- The redness of the map.
"By the author of the award-winning To Be a Machine, a deeply considered look at the people and places in confrontation with the end of our days We're alive in a time of worst-case scenarios: The weather has gone uncanny, volatile. Our old post-war alliances are crumbling. Everywhere you look there's an omen, a joke whose punchline is the end of the world. How are we to live in the shadow of such a grim future? What does the world hold for our children? What might it be like to live through the worst? And what is anybody doing about it? Dublin-based writer Mark O'Connell ("wryly humorous, cogently insightful"--NPR) is possessed by these questions. 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. And he bears witness to those places where the future has already arrived--real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he offers us a unique window into our apocalyptic imagination. Part tour, part pilgrimage, Notes from an Apocalypse is an affecting and hopeful meditation on our alarming present tense. With insight, humanity, and wit, O'Connell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isn't the end of the world?"--
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
- 1 Tribulations (p. 1)
- 2 Preparations (p. 19)
- 3 Luxury Survival (p. 43)
- 4 Bolt-hole (p. 71)
- 5 Off-World Colony (p. 102)
- 6 Under the Hide (p. 132)
- 7 The Final Resting Place of the Future (p. 183)
- 8 The Redness of the Map (p. 221)
- Acknowledgments (p. 255)
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Irish writer O'Connell (To Be a Machine)here explores his obsessive fears about the future. Though overwhelmed by the many signs of looming catastrophe and collapse, O'Connell felt pressured, as a parent, to be less despairing about the future, and so undertook an investigation into what other doomsday believers were doing to prepare for impending disaster. His adventures took him deep into the guidebooks and videos of prepper, or survivalist, subculture; to the Black Hills of South Dakota to tour a massive underground bunker system for the wealthy; to New Zealand, where tech billionaires were buying property to escape the anticipated collapse; and to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a postapocalyptic wasteland. From his self-directed immersion in these doomsday scenarios, O'Connell emerged if not more optimistic about the future, at least able to live more easily in the present. VERDICT O'Connell is not only a sharp observer but a master at parsing the various subtexts underneath the surface rhetoric of these apocalyptic movements. This witty, profound, and beautifully told story will appeal to doomsday worriers and nonworriers alike.--Cynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJPublishers Weekly Review
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. (Apr.)Booklist Review
Possessed by "apocalyptic anxieties," O'Connell (To Be a Machine, 2017) undertook "a series of perverse pilgrimages, to those places where the shadows of the future fall most darkly across the present." From his home in Dublin, he journeys to the far reaches of the online disaster-prepper community. In the U.S., he meets a developer selling off former South Dakota military bunkers to the apocalypse-conscious, and attends a conference on Mars colonization in LA. He visits the New Zealand refuge purchased by an American tech billionaire, takes a daylong "nature solo" in a Scottish industrial wasteland turned wildlife refuge, and embarks on an undeniably strange and gripping adventure-tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. This combines far-reaching analyses of the predicaments we're in now, from sociopolitical and philosophical angles, with relatable, often funny, and ultimately hopeful personal moments (including affecting passages on raising young children). A more-than-companionable guide, O'Connell sets out to understand how we live under constant threat of climate change and political terror, and finds that the answer is, more or less, we do.Kirkus Book Review
An around-the-end-of-the-world tour in the company of a smart, funny, and thoughtful guide.Near the beginning, O'Connell (To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, 2016) describes watching a video of an "emaciated polar bear" struggling to find food. "It occurred to me then that the disgust I felt was a symptom of a kind of moral vertigo," he writes, "resulting from the fact that the very technology that allowed me to witness the final pathetic tribulations of this emaciated beast was in fact a cause of the animal's suffering in the first place." To live in the modern world is to be complicit in its decline; nothing new there. But what can/should/will we do about it? The author makes no attempt to persuade us to drive electric cars and sequester carbon. Whether visiting underground shelters in South Dakota, billionaire refuges in New Zealand, or the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, he studies the end of the world from a decidedly detached perspective. About a retreat he attended in Scotland, he writes, "this was not the sort of explicitly romantic endeavor I would ordinarily involve myself in, what with the unwieldy carapace of cynicism I had allowed to grow around me over the course of my adult life." This kind of self-awareness around his project enables the humor O'Connell uses to cope with horror. His wry tone is effective in exposing the ridiculousness of many of the survivalists and technolibertarians he encountered. "If my portrayal of him [the owner of a luxury underground shelter] seems to be verging on the mode of caricature, even of outright grotesquerie, it is only because this was how he presented himself to me in fact." It might be a bit much if O'Connell weren't able to offer a sincere and life-affirming response to all the grimness: Things have always been bad and about to get worse. Nihilism can follow from that, but it doesn't have to.A contribution to the doom-and-gloom genre that might actually cheer you up. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
MARK O'CONNELL is the author of To Be a Machine , which was awarded the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine , Slate , and The Guardian . He lives in Dublin with his family.There are no comments on this title.