Apocalypse Pretty Soon

Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America

by Alex Heard

Posted by: Matt Staggs @ mattstaggs.blogspot.com

In the last decades of the twentieth century reporter and magazine editor Alex Heard set out to investigate America's doomsday cults, survivalists, fringe scientists and underground religious movements, people with little in common beyond the belief that "the end" was coming very soon.

It was a journey of about ten years, during which Heard met and interviewed starry-eyed UFO contactees, grim "Earth Changes" survivalists, wannabe astral projecters, radical life extension proponents and Christian fundamentalists. The book APOCALYPSE PRETTY SOON: TRAVELS IN END-TIME AMERICA collects these stories.

Not all of the subjects of APOCALYPSE are people who believe that the end of the world is around the corner. Sure, APOCALYPSE has its share of raving delusional paranoiacs, but for the most part, the people profiled in APOCALYPSE are earnestly dealing with modern society's big issues - loss of traditional spirituality, overpopulation, pollution, anomie - in the best ways that they know how, through science or faith, and even when their solutions are wrong you have to admire their sincerity. It certainly seems like Heard does; the only people who really get skewered in APOCALYPSE are cynical money-makers and ego-trippers.

cont. @ mattstaggs.blogspot.com