Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World [Paperback]

Meghann Marco (Author), Dominic Bugatto (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 2005

We're a culture obsessed with the end of the world. Whether it's Y2K or an asteroid barrelling towards us, the fact that 37 percent of species are set to become extinct in the next fifty years due to global warming, or weapons of mass destruction popping up in turkey farms, Armageddon might not be far off. We're also obsessed with movies, and studios have been releasing films about the end of the world as long as Hollywood has been Hollywood. Now, in FIELD GUIDE TO THE APOCALYPSE, Meghann Marco combines two of our favourite obsessions. Using information gleaned from dozens of movies wherein the unthinkable occurs, FIELD GUIDE offers practical advice on a variety of situations that may well occur as the apocalypse draws near. You'll learn how to deal with damn dirty apes (PLANET OF THE APES), how to convert a '70s muscle car to run on bathtub gin (MAD MAX), how to deal with last-woman-on-earth survival guilt, how to identify yourself as a replicant (BLADE RUNNER), and how to synthesise a species-saving vaccine from your own mucus. The FIELD GUIDE couldn't be more timely: According to Blade Runner all living animals will be genetic copies by 2019. Buy FIELD GUIDE now before you have to get copies for all your clones!

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment (May 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068987877X
• ISBN-13: 978-0689878770
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #972,749 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author of 'Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World', Meghann grew up outside of Chicago, IL. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arizona Daily Star rave review, June 1, 2005

By 

Phil Villarreal "Phil Villarreal, Arizona Dai... (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World (Paperback)

By Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star

If the movies have taught us anything, it's that the apocalypse will most definitely arrive. When it does, we're going to need a 1970s muscle car to get through all the explosions and mad dashes against warlords.

When the day is nigh, it will also help to acquire a canine sidekick and a cache of weapons.

"Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World" ($10.36), by former video-store manager Meghann Marco, pragmatically guides you through the ins and outs of identifying and surviving false utopias, alien invasions and weather cataclysms.

Under the guise of a how-to book, "Field Guide" emerges as rapacious satire that takes the whole of action and sci-fi film history and shapes it into an oddly constructed world with its own arbitrary rules and regulations, to be joyfully torn apart by Marco's snappy, fluid prose. A must-read for any film fanatic, the guide plunders contradictions and clichés, taking preposterous movie science at its own level and holding it up for ridicule.

A vein of hilarious nostalgia courses through the pages, as we learn how not to be replaced by a robot in the vein of "Blade Runner," as well as how to identify if our food is people ("Soylent Green"). The gamut of popcorn movies is covered and comedically splintered, ranging from "Metropolis" (1927) to "Signs" (2002) and slapdown of the midlife crises by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that caused them to re-edit their classics.

With wit, intense observation, occasional flashes of raw anger and reserves of accessible film knowledge, Marco makes her points with a flourish in a page-turner that demands to be read in one sitting.

- Contact reporter Phil Villarreal at 520-573-4130 or [e-mail]

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Buy It. Read It. Tell other people about it., November 9, 2005

By 

Kira's Mama "kirasmama" (Aurora, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World (Paperback)

- Do houseguests constantly complain that you've got nothing interesting to read in the bathroom?
- Do friends complain that waiting impatiently for you (as you try on your 33rd successive outfit while getting ready to go to the club) is boring because your coffee table contains only archaic episodes of the Onion and a few unpaid cable bills* to read?
- Are you constantly searching for 'light' or 'light-hearted' reading material that won't suck you in to a plot-line and refuse to let you get to sleep until 5 minutes before your alarm goes off?

Then go get yourself a copy of Field Guide to the Apocalypse : Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World by Meghann Marco

Most of the people I choose to spend my Saturday nights gaming, watching movies or even just socializing with, probably could have written this book. I probably could have written this book. You probably could've written this book** -- if we weren't so busy whiling our time away reading and writing things like Amazon.com Reviews instead, that is.

But thank heavens that Meghann Marco did - because it needed to be written!! And she definitely did it justice. Don't believe me without thumbing through it yourself? <A href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/068987877X/ref=sib_rdr_ex/104-1816661-9405525?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00I&j=0#reader-page">Go read a few excerpts.</a>

It's a delightful little book - and if you keep it on the coffeetable, or in the W.C., it will amuse the crap out of you*** - presuming you have at least a passing knowledge of post-apocalyptic movies. It's good to be familiar with just about any Charlton Heston after-the-end-of-civilization movie (Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Omega Man...) It's good to know any Kubrick 'futurism' movies (2001, Dr. Strangelove...) It's good to know some of the more popular Philip K. Dick stories-adapted-to-movies (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report...) It doesn't hurt to have a healthy knowledge of the Classic-Sci-Fi-novel-turned-movies (1984, Farenheit 451, Brave New World...) in order to get a lot of the 'Cognoscenti' references. But even if your only familiarity is a brush with Logan's Run or the Matrix movies, you'll still enjoy the humor.

Honestly, this isn't deep, meaningful literature. It's not groundbreaking - there are a slew of similar books on the same subjects, including those limited to just one genre of PA society (zombies, comets, asteroids, wastelands...)
But it IS damn funny... and it's definitely worth the cover price.

Even if nobody else ever stays in your post-apocalypticesque bathroom long enough to find out why <u>you</u> kept laughing so hard while you were in there!


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* Which at least explains why they aren't watching pay-per-view adult movies on your TV instead
** An assumption, given that you're literate enough to have gotten this far and clearly have at least a passing interest in the subject matter - or you wouldn't have kept reading
*** The pun was unintentional when I wrote it, but then it amused me, so I left it in due to vanity (did you catch that one?) and because I can (can! hah... another bad restroom pun! I crack me up - not as much as the book does, but you get what you pay for)

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love in the Ruins, May 26, 2005

By 

Deuce of Clubs (Sonoran Desert, Arizona) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World (Paperback)

It's always inspiring when someone you know gets her very own ISBN, especially if it's for a book that's funny, even moreso if it's intentionally funny. After watching scads of end-of-the-world flicks, Meghann Marco (of MeghannMarco.com, wtf) has written the book that is bound to continue to inspire even after our planet's doomsday -- I predict it will inspire fights to the death among the coming apocalypse's more intelligent would-be survivors (i.e., those outside of Tim LaHaye's readership).

Though it's inspired by films, Meghann's book is packed surprisingly full with Actual Information, some of which doesn't even have to wait for the Apocalypse in order to be true. For example, though she's talking about survival in Arctic conditions, "a lot of work means a lot of death" is undeniable by anyone who's ever done much of it. At least one tip has clearly been studied by the U.S. military:

"If you don't understand what the informant is saying, keep kneeing him in the stomach until he says, `Okay, okay, okay' and speaks English. Everybody speaks English if you knee them in the stomach enough."