Earth abides

Isherwood Williams gets bitten by a snake while camping and after he recovers and returns to civilization he discovers that a mysterious disease has killed off most of the population. As a result civilization collapses. It is a quiet book, a steady accumulation of observations of the breakdown of civilization, the encroachment of the natural world into that void and, after gathering some survivors around him to form a community, the challenge of how to preserve the spark of civilization for future generations. It is essentially a treatise on earth science, anthropology, sociology, etc., disguised as a novel, but artfully done by the author. The ruminations of Isherwood Williams in the course of the book would relevant topics of discussion today (if we can switch the channel from American Idol for a moment) in light of the current economic collapse, resource depletion, and environmental instability. But then , Soylent Green taste like chicken, or so I'm told.