Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America [Hardcover]

Alex Heard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1999

Over a ten-year period, intrepid cultural traveller 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. This is a funny and frightening look at millennial, utopian and futuristic subcultures. Among the cast of characters encountered are: 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 12-foot cross across every nation on earth; life-extensionists convinced that if they can only live long enough, science will make sure that they live forever; and a collection of other paranoid, credulous, and/or ecstatic countrymen.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 Appelo

From Library Journal

Heard, an editor for the New York Times Magazine, has been traveling across the United States for the last ten years, seeking out people who believe the end of time is near. Here he reports on his odyssey, bringing into focus a varied assortment of millennialists, doom-and-gloom New Agers, UFO enthusiasts, "life forever"- ists, and militant right-wing survivalists. No major theme unites the book, except that there are a lot of folks with some very weird beliefs. A cynic could portray these people as pathetic, disillusioned losers or crazies on the fringes of America, but Heard sees them as humans who believe deeply in alternatives, whether salvation by UFOs or rebirth via a bloody war. Some are harmless and happy; others have the potential to do great damage. This is a reporter's first-person account, and it's funny, opinionated, boldly subjective, fascinating, and entertaining.?Glenn Masuchika, Chaminade Univ. Lib., Honolulu
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393046893
• ISBN-13: 978-0393046892
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,906,879 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Things More Frightening Than The Apocalypse..., November 11, 2002

By 

ED Detetcheverrie "Q" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels In End-Time America (Paperback)

What's more frightening than the idea of an apocalypse? How 'bout all the people out there with so many freaky ideas of how and when it will come... From a psychological standpoint, this book is absolutely fascinating, darkly humorous, and yet undeniably frightening in its portrayal of people who might be neighbors or cousins of yours and mine who await an alien takeover or the return of Christ or what have you and the extent to which these hopes or fears have affected their lives and the lives of those they know and love. Obviously, the author has focused on one particular quirk of the various lives his subjects lead, and yet what is magnified for the reader are some of the most thought-provoking and bizarre ideas and behaviors I have ever encountered in print outside of an issue of Psychology Today. A book that can be aborbed and pondered by anyone with common sense and the ability to seperate reality from fantasy, I would avoid letting this fall into the hands of impressionable or highly imaginative young readers who might become fixated on some particular section and grow fearful because of it. Disturbing in both an entertaining and harrowing way, I couldn't put it down and hope for some sort of a sequel. Amazing.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining look at some bizarre world views, July 18, 2003

By 

"ringfish" (Loveland, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels In End-Time America (Paperback)

An entertaining, funny and often sad look at some of the various personalities that make up the cultish world of millenial apocalyptic groups. The common thread here is the belief in imminent apocalyptic change by the groups through different means (alien visitation, return of Jesus, cataclysmic Earth changes, etc.).
Heard, it seems, tries to be objective and open-minded about each group at first. But when faced with the absurdity of their belief systems and after getting to know the people that form the leadership of these groups, he can't help but present a slightly more skeptical opinion. By the end of each chapter, after Heard has presented his study of the group, it's leadership, tactics, and beliefs, it's hard to not think these people are out of their minds.
The book is also a fine study in the unusual aspects of the human psyche. From the egomaniacal and seemingly deranged leaders to their willing and needy followers, Heard gives us a hard look at some of the personalities that make up these fringe groups.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Joyride to the Future, May 4, 2001

By 

Nelson Kellogg (SSU, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels In End-Time America (Paperback)

Alex Heard's adventures in the borderlands of culture remind me of the joys of listening to radical idealists of any stripe. I could feel the presence of each of his subjects, whether dreamer of a new Atlantis or channeler of benevolent, alien intelligence, or cross-bearing transcontinental walker. Each individual is a revelation in the spectrum of humanity, and most of them are endearing in distinct and peculiar ways. Heard is not unkind to either his subjects or his readers. He is a translator between "here" and "there," whose writing is so fluid and flawless that these strange world views slide into one another leaving the reader wondering how preferrable his own reality is in comparison. Read this book and be, by turns, amazed, entertained, touched, and more eager to engage the world and try out other lenses on reality.