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 Kirkus Reviews
New York Times Magazine journalist Heard uncovers some truly memorable manifestations of millennial fervor in this quasi-ethnography. There's the Pentecostal Mississippi dairy farmer who believes that his all-red heifer is a sign that a new temple will be established in Jerusalem, ushering in the endtime; there is also the Israeli rabbi who, with similar millennial expectations, traveled to America to check out the ``apocalypse cow.'' There are the radical ``Gaiaists'' who claim that Mother Nature has grown tired of humanity's abuses and is about to unleash a series of cataclysms to kick us off the planet; these followers plan to be the only ones prepared to survive earth's attack. Heard calls these well-meaning survivalists ``Swiss Family Robinson with a Rambo complex.'' Then there are the UFO ``contactee'' groups, including the southern Californiabased (where else?) Unarians, who await the 2001 arrival of the ``tall, wise, and kindly Space Brothers,'' benevolent beings sent to assist earthlings on the road to enlightenment. If there's a surprising thread among these groups, it's that most of them are looking forward to the apocalypse. Not all are prophets of doom; many are just ordinary folks who expect to greet the coming age with great joy. Heard does a fine job of outlining some of the paradoxes of their widely variant forms of prophecy belief. His writing is as crisp and snappy as the book's title, though a few of his assertions arent fully supported by his research. (Some facts also need checking, such as his claim that ``hundreds'' died in the Oklahoma City blast.) Heard comes down rather unsympathetically on many of his interviewees, repeatedly utilizing pejorative and uninformative words like ``hoodoo'' to describe their millennial beliefs. Still, on balance, he gives their social grievances an eloquent airing. Overall, a humorous and well-written attempt to understand our ongoing fascination with the apocalypse. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Apocalypse Pretty Soon" is well-written and often amusing. -- Wall Street Journal, Lisa Gubernick, 5 February 1999
[A] funny, unsettling, crank-packed book....Heard's mix of humorous skepticism for these obsessed, unquenchable characters results in an engagingly sane book that acknowledges the cultural need for eccentrics and weirdos and also the cultural need to keep an idea on them...[Grade:] A. -- Entertainment Weekly, L.S. Klepp, 5 March 1999
[Alex Heard] keeps glimpsing dark and menacing aspects of millennialism, but committed from the start to the sunny side of apocalyptic belief, he almost always retreats to wisecracks. -- The New York Times Book Review, Tony Horowitz
[H]ysterical....Heard's compassion for society's outcasts, bound together in a struggle against the clock and convention, is powerful and compelling, and ultimately serves to heighten the book's appeal. -- New York Post, Tom Roe, 24 January 1999
