The End of the World Book: A Novel

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My favorite entries revolved around famous paintings, where the "point" of the painting is jettisoned to wax poetic on the calf muscles of an incidental figure in the background; I found the entry on his long-time boyfriend to be one of the most tender and moving things I've read in a while (describing a small boy's felt hat kept stashed in a closet: "the hat's dusty and slightly battered, as objects salvaged from childhood tend to be. You'd be hard pressed to find an apocalypse more total than the one Native America has confronted for more than four hundred years. Set in the future and with the idea of these two teenagers being the last of the human race really made me want to read this.

But except for the areas hit directly by WW2 fighting, humanity did not revert back to a pre-1870 standard of living, as Zeihan predicts could be a consequence of global security chaos.A layered, Joycean masterpiece that is as much about the power of story and myth as it is about the end of the world and everything after. A philosopher, historian of religions, and anthropologist, Ernesto de Martino (1908–1965) produced a body of work that prefigured many ideas and concerns that would later come to animate anthropology. Either way, it has the feeling of a land gone to seed, with bombed-out, disconnected cities, enormous red suns, inexplicable, endless fires. Back in time stories are hard to do well because anything you change can effect the likeability of the story or the characters.

Second of all, the book functions extremely well as a disaster scenario — a vivid picture of what could happen if the human race allows globalization to collapse.

One of the classics of the genre, in which a student, Ish, emerges from a period of isolation and illness—he was bitten by a diseased rattlesnake—and steps back into the world to find almost no one left alive in it. However, some contest this and argue that, on the contrary, mime was the greatest cultural achievement of the decade: mime, that subtle art form in which people with white pancake makeup on their faces, with black markings on their lips and around their eyes, dressed in overalls and horizontally striped T-shirts, brilliantly expressed something, anything, by virtue of movement and facial expression alone, that is to say, mutely, as if their tongues had been cut out of their heads.

Simpson follows the money, explores the politics of evidence, and argues against the utopian hyperbole of present-day ‘road talk’, finding both humanitarian crises and freewheeling international capital in the hedgerows. We are in the middle right now of an attempted worldwide oligarchic push to reinstall feudalism, the dismally-failed governance model that dominated 99 percent of societies on six continents for 6,000 years,” he told EW.Instead, it feels like an important message wrapped inside entertaining, thought-provoking nightmare upon nightmare with a scarred-for-life-flavored cherry on top. It’s utterly unbelievable that he would know all these people and all their actions and how they all link together across the whole planet let alone multiple planets. Everything east of the Mississippi has been destroyed by a nuclear attack; the scant survivors have been dosed with a bioweapon that has infected them with the plague (just to be safe, I suppose).

Having read the book and opened the gifts at the right time she said she felt “immersed in the story. One of them glances at the map he makes as an alibi and is like yeah this enormous amount of stuff you know that a historian dedicating their life to studying this year or whatever in time would struggle to grasp the big picture of fitted onto this one map I barely paid any attention too. The data shows we've made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history.

This book offers a plan to move from our current death economy to a healthier world that centres and validates Indigenous knowledges. The collective behind it embodies the very politics necessary to win a just transition that is worthy of the name: Indigenous-led, internationalist, rooted in solidarity, and crackling with moral clarity.