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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."
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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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