Customer Reviews

The Book of End Times: Grappling With the Millennium

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As described in the prologue, this book deals with the idea of apocalypse apart from millennium fever and doomsday prophets. "It is the premise of this short book...that millennium fever is nonsense, but that apocalypse is not...whenever it is suggested that the human race is approaching a turning point in its long and heavy-handed sovereignty over planet Earth-and that we do not yet know the nature of the new world to come-sense is being spoken..."
The book is divided up into four parts: "A Story Called Millennium," "What To Do in Dreamland Till We're Dead," "There is a Wasteland and It Is Us," and "How are Tricks?." Images of everything from Nazi Germany to the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer to Pokemon to John Wayne to Jesus to goofy street signs are juxtaposed with the author's own text and quotes from a variety of sources equally as diverse. There are sure to be arguments of whether or not the book relies too heavily on junk science and religious twaddle but the mission of trying to get people to stop believing the nuts who "name" the date the world will end is unquestionably a positive thing (unless you are the proprietor of a creepy cult of course). Even if you are not particularly interested in the whole worry that we are living in the end times business, you can still derive plenty of enjoyment from this book. I was thumbing through it in a bookstore and bought it because I liked the quotations and the neat artwork. As a pleasant side effect, I have read several of the stories quoted in this book because the snippet included by the author was so intriguing. Anyhow, if you are interested in the idea of mankind running itself into the ground or the notion of the world ending in some blaze of glory of Biblical proportions, this book would be a great selection. And if you aren't, check it out anyhow for the graphics and the quotes. (...)

Concepts such as memetics, hysteria, and the faster-and-faster motion of the world leap from these pages. This book is energetic with articles, quotes and pictures, both old and new. Yes, many of the articles are critical of a number of modern society's tendencies -- but there is nothing knee-jerk about it, and more importantly, nothing unartistic. Open it to a random page and you will find something interesting. You may or may not agree with it, but it will make you think, and best yet, you may or may not agree with what it makes you think.

There are things in this book that, if you look closely, parody themselves, and probably on purpose. The style takes on a few pretensions, but I am sure this is conscious. It arrives at no single conclusion, but a whole host of them, leaving the reader with more questions than answers -- and despite the frightening nature of many of these ideas, remains surprising and playful throughout. It's a beautiful interwoven collage of art and words, and I regularly buy used copies where I can find them to give to friends.

Needless to say, I heartily recommend it!

This volume is certainly a bookworm like myself's anomaly and change in scenery. Its appearance is more like a magazine. (My ONLY complaint is the garish backgrounds that make the text difficult to concentrate on at times) However, the book elucidates on the point that millenialism is absurd. (Which we can certainly see in hindsight... us still being here into the year 2001 CE) but that Apocalypticism is a realistic future in contradistinction with our fear of the sky falling at Y2K. Now, that does not mean a literal construing of John's Revelation (one more absurdity) but that from our own doing as the crew of planet Earth that we may convert our fear of mortality into the death of our planet. The Eschaton manifests itself repeatedly in media, sci-fi, conspiracy theories, and the like. This work aims to shake some sense into the paranoid neurotics of this epoch. It is a two-edged sword, sorting out the nonsense beliefs in UFO... probings and clandestine Satanic ritual abuse, but exposing that we could very well destroy our island home in the cosmos.

You cannot become bored with "The Book of End Times." The West has been drugged and lied to with the chicanery of prophets of doom and preachers of death... this is my prescription. Not that this book alone would ever set us straight of the mass hypnosis and hysteria from the fears of fanatical fundamentalists, (Just as was pointed out in the book that the philosophical works of Hume were universally ignored, and the later {and lesser} works of Michael Shermer, in 'Why People Believe Weird Things') but, seriously, check it out. 'goes well with Mick Farren's "Conspiracies, Lies, and Hidden Agendas" or/and Richard Abane's "End Time Visions"

Herein John Clute espouses the evils of modern society. To believe his words is to take any faith in today's state of living and cast it aside like so many Y2K-preparation manuals. Clute distances himself from any relevance by admitting that the true date of the end of the world cannot be known until after the fact, but that surely the end must be on its way. Surely.

Clute's major thesis is that anything modern is either symptomatic or compounding of the imminent end of the world. He weaves through page after page of graphic and prose juxtapositions, perhaps trying to illustrate the futility of human creativity, or perhaps just entertaining himself with his own cleverness. Clute writes on and on about, of all things, the recent century-recapping issue of LIFE magazine, Nostradamus, Star Wars, Hopi indians, Tamagotchis, and Hell itself.

To his credit, he has provided the reader with some outstanding graphic images and quotations, often merged into the same striking page. Clute borrows extensively from science fiction movies and TV shows, classic art, and news events, although not always to great effect. In a diatribe about God, he shows a picture of a young Elvis along with the DNA double-helix. Um, what....irony? Later, we see an atomic explosion mixed with a picture of the American western homestead. Clever! I'll be cutting some of these pages out and framing them. As a testament to Clute's redundancy, I'm certain that any lost pages will not go noticed.

This is a book to be enjoyed for how much it loves itself, and for how it's message is all the more diluted from its own arrogance.