The End is Always Near
Ratings25
Average rating3.6
In his first book, the creator of the award-winning podcast Hardcore History looks to some of humanity's most apocalyptic moments to understand the challenges of our future. Do tough times create tougher people? Can humanity handle the power of its weapons without destroying itself? Will human technology or capabilities ever peak or regress? Why, since the dawn of time, has it always seemed as though death and destruction is waiting just around the corner? In The End is Always Near, Dan Carlin connects the past and future in fascinating and colourful ways, exploring a question that has hung over humanity like the Sword of Damocles from the collapse of the Bronze Age to the nuclear era - that of human survival. Combining his trademark mix of storytelling, history, and thought experiments, Carlin forces us to consider what sounds like fantasy: that we might suffer the same fate as all previous civilisations. Will our world ever become a ruin for future archaeologists to dig up and explore? This thrillingly expansive and entertaining book will make you look at the past - and future - in a completely different way.
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Incredibly uneven collection of essays. Very US-centric in perspective.
Each piece of this book was engaging. It was like listening to Dan Carlin just free-form discussing the different ways, in history, the world was believed to be ending.
I would say the book overall does not tend to make... an arc? But that would be an intensely hard thing to do- to put any kind of overarching themes or lessons to all these various apocalyptic scenarios.
I would say that each piece is also well thought out. Spitballing how things might have been different, and why things happened the way they did, is one of Dan Carlin's biggest strengths, as well as his immense body of research (or as he calls it, his notes from his shows).
And as I quoted before, his thoughts on pandemics are so accurate as to really hurt, today, in April 2020.
I wanted to like this book, but somewhere between the not-very-connected chapters and the overexaggerated title the book failed to deliver. The chapters are very thorough in what they cover, but there's very little linking one to the next, and I honestly felt a few of them were extremely dry. I liked the section on the Bronze Age in the beginning and the sections about nuclear war at the end, but the middle sort of dragged on. It also seemed to tackle topics a mile wide but only an inch deep in terms of content, which left me with more questions that went unanswered.
In short, kind of underwhelming.
