Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

Written by:
Mark O'connell
Narrated by:
Mark O'connell

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
3
Narrator
3
Release Date
April 2020
Duration
7 hours 6 minutes
Summary
'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?
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Anonymous

If you believe that climate science is real and that it poses a threat to all species on the planet you will enjoy the author's dry take on those preparing for the end of times though most of them deny the actual reason we are heading in that direction. His Irish accent and take on the average American's view of the world is insightful and often funny. The book is a complete waste of time if you deny climate science and/or believe it is all in God's plan. A simpleton will be bored and angry if they can actually get through it.

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