Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels In End-Time America
Since 1987,New York Times Magazineeditor Alex Heard has scouted out Americans with out-there beliefs: people who breed red heifers to hasten Christ's Second Coming and pen books likeThe Dead Are AliveandIf 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 onBewitched, 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 bestsellingLeft Behindthrillers far better once Heard briefs you on the whole range of stranger biblical end-times interpreters. Like David Gelernter's1939: The Lost World of the Fair,Apocalypse Pretty Soonhas 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 Appelo--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.