Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
Mark O'Connell
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
Mark O'Connell
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
O’Connell has a gift for channelling the 'sense of looming crisis' that characterises our times, but is able to step outside it, to bring it into focus.
Some of the stops on this travelogue are so spectacularly scenic that I found myself envious, and not a little bit suspicious: Here was someone who had figured out a way to tour the world by writing about the end of it.
Mr. O’Connell’s investigation into end-times paranoia, prognostication and 'prepping' (stockpiling tins, dusting down that bunker) could hardly be more timely—and yet in some ways his new book has already dated beyond anything he could have predicted.
... brilliant.
... black and ironic...But it is also personal and sincere.
... full of wry humor, and O’Connell is an earnest, self-effacing narrator wise enough to employ filial love as recurrent theme to give his book emotional ballast. His greatest virtue, however, is his talent as a critic and interpreter.
This survey of end-times obsessives, from climate scientists to conspiracy theorists, may strike some readers as unnecessarily close for comfort.
O’Connell’s personal writing brings to mind Joan Didion’s introductory essay in The White Album, written amid the turmoil of the 1960s.
I don’t know if [O'Connell's] books are therapeutic ways of working out his anxieties, or if they drive them deeper as he researches more about his topics, but either way, I don’t want him to stop. They’re fun but filling.
O’Connell’s prose is lucid and elegant, the best sort of reminder that reserving for fiction expectations of 'literariness' and beautifully crafted language is witless bullshit. And for a book on anxiety, apocalypse, and death, it’s very funny.
Rather than assessing the science itself, Notes From An Apocalypse explores how such threats affect individuals. Written before the COVID-19 crisis, it is an eerily prescient mix of confession, political critique, meditation and comic monologue on living in the face of death.
... charming, anxious, and tender essays.
... chockful of this sort of rueful wit.
... not the book you’re expecting—but unquestionably the book we all need during the seismic shift of COVID-19.
O’Connell’s apocalypse looms but never touches down. Intended as commentary on the current moment, it now reads like an artifact from a gentler era.
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..
Reading this book in the midst of the pandemic, I found an invaluable companion to this moment, one that expertly describes the ethical choices we now face.
A few months ago, it might have been easier to dismiss prepper culture and to read O’Connell’s book as an entertaining dispatch from the fringe. But to read it now is to reckon with the ways in which disaster stalks the everyday, ever capable of surprising us.
... a very dark depressing journey, which fortunately ends on a note of hope. Mark O’Connell is a very self-conscious writer. He is aware of the contradictions in everyday life, the conflicts in his own being, and the privilege he enjoys as a white, middle class Irish author. His examination of where we seem to be heading exploits all of those things in his own personality.
There’s a lot of area to cover between not yet and too late. O’Connell zigzags across it many times, but he sticks to well-trodden paths, from relatable observations about his own ultimately hypocrisies to theoretical interpretations: the apocalypse as patriarchy, as white-supremacy, as colonialism, as genocide, as luxury consumerism, as a projection of the individual’s anxiety about his own death.
... 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..
O’Connell, a Dublin-based journalist with a brilliantly wry style, seeks to entertain rather than scare. This is, instead, a light-hearted look around the World’s End; the Book of Revelation with a Bill Bryson touch.
... refreshing candour.
These vignettes offer a fascinating insight into a species obsessed with its own demise—and into the ways humankind is trying to confront the hard-to-bear reality of climate change. These range from the absurd to the poignant. Along the way, Mr O’Connell moves nimbly between scenes and eras, skipping from the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz to a history of the Grand Tour. It helps that he is funny, too.
[O'Connell] is a funny writer.
It’s a compelling premise: confronting the end of the world. But that’s not quite what O’Connell does. He doesn’t so much confront the end of the world as write a travelogue that’s a combination of a close-up look at subcultures of privileged obsessives and disaster tourism.
... plenty to ponder as well as laugh about en route.
What saves this engrossing work of reportage from being a form of ‘apocalypse tourism’ is O’Connell’s wry self-awareness and his penetrating analysis of the ‘prepper' (those preparing for the end) narrative as an escapist, masculine frontier fantasy dressed up as hard-headed realism..
The laughter one experiences while reading Mark O’Connell’s new book is the laughter of someone watching their home burn down while they stand on their front lawn in their underwear, seeing themselves—in all their absurdity—reflected in the windows of their soon-to-be-ash abode.
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..
An around-the-end-of-the-world tour in the company of a smart, funny, and thoughtful guide.