Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-time America Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-time America Book

Since 1987, New York Times Magazine editor Alex Heard has scouted out Americans with out-there beliefs: people who breed red heifers to hasten Christ's Second Coming and pen books like The Dead Are Alive and If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive; astral-plane sky pilots; homicidal survivalists. The best piece is "Welcome, Space Brothers!" about UFO fans whose leader, Ruth Norman, "combined the couture sensibilities of a drag queen with the joie de vivre of a Frisbee-chasing Irish setter." He conveys what it must be like to be one who sat rapt as Ruth spoke, "sounding like a combination of Julia Child, Aunt Clara on Bewitched, and a bossy little girl telling other little girls the rules of her playhouse." Heard gets inside their closed systems to poke fun from within, and often puts things in historical context. You'll understand mainstream apocalyptic literature like the bestselling Left Behind thrillers far better once Heard briefs you on the whole range of stranger biblical end-times interpreters. Like David Gelernter's 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, Apocalypse Pretty Soon has a poignant sense of what commonsense culture has lost in giving up its millennial dreams. Heard is valuable because he's thorough and genuinely interested in why Arthur Blessitt finds it blessed to drag a 105-pound cross across the globe, surviving attacks by mamba snake, crocodile, Nicaraguan firing squad, and LAPD choke hold. His book is madly funny, and deeply sad. --Tim AppeloRead More

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  • Product Description

    As the final countdown to the year 2000 begins, a funny and frightening look at millennial, utopian, and futuristic subcultures. Over a ten-year period, intrepid cultural traveler Alex Heard has been sojourning among America's most intensely religious and political believers-sometimes dark, sometimes joyful, usually bizarre, and very occasionally deadly groups who bring their own all-American spin to the Biblical idea of the apocalypse. Among the amazing cast of characters encountered: a UFO cult whose members look forward to the mass landing of Angelic Space Brothers in 2001; trembling New Age penitents who fear our polluted planet is bent on taking highly conscious revenge; a born-again Christian determined, on God's orders, to carry a twelve-foot cross across every nation on earth; life-extentionists convinced that if they can only live long enough science will make sure they'll live forever; and a rich smorgasbord of other of our most credulous, paranoid, and/or ecstatic countrymen. Alex Heard has been in their midst and, in Apocalypse Pretty Soon, he offers a compelling mix of history, reportage, humor, and sociology-a colorful group portrait of a uniquely weird moment in American life.

  • 0393046893
  • 9780393046892
  • A Heard
  • 10 August 1999
  • W. W. Norton & Co.
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 360
  • illustrated edition
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