The End of the World Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The End of the World Book

"The foretelling of the end of the world is as old as the wind in the trees," writes Lewis Lapham, yet "against the siege of dire prophecy the reading of history provides a reliable defense." While the accounts collected in The End of the World do not, of course, depict the ultimate destruction of the planet or the conclusion to life as we know it, they do present catastrophic events in vivid, often unsettling prose. Here you'll find Pliny the Younger on the fall of Pompeii: "For several days past there had been earth tremors which were not particularly alarming because they are frequent in Campania: but that night the shocks were so violent that everything felt as if it were not only shaken but overturned." Or Jack London at the San Francisco earthquake of 1906: "On Wednesday morning at a quarter past five came the earthquake.... Inside of twelve hours, half the heart of the city was gone." There are other events that, while not earth-shattering, were emotionally devastating to those involved, such as the Cherokee Nation's forced march on the "trail of tears" or the defeat of the Confederacy. And there are even samples from modern-day prophets of doom: "We didn't make a mistake when we wrote in our previous releases that New York would be destroyed on September 4 and October 14, 1993. We didn't make a mistake, not even a teeny eeny one!" Well, thank goodness the world is still around--knock on wood--and that we have the time to read this book, with its fascinating glimpses of worlds gone by. --Ron HoganRead More

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  • Product Description

    The Romans at Pompeii, the Confederates at Richmond, and the German Jews in 1938 all had reason to believe that the world was ending. But when the storm had passed and the dust had cleared, no matter what the destruction, the world was ending. But when the storm had passed and the dust had cleared, no matter what the destruction, the world still turned. This fascinating collection contains works by diverse historians including Plato, Thucydidies, Pliny, Leonardo da Vinci, John Donne, Freud, Mencken, and Picasso. Mary Chestnut writes in her diary as the Confederacy crumbles around her; Jack London describes the great earthquake that struck San Francisco in 1906; a Bolshevik watches the Winter Palace fall in 1917; a Polish poet fights for food in Auschwitz. Soldiers from every major war from ancient Rome through Vietnam march toward death; a writer toils while the Black Plague topples those around him; a monk watches the Aztec empire fall to the Spaniards; the Middle Passage defies humanity and life. The most famous episodes of human tragedy are described by the men and women who lived them.

    With an introduction by Simon Schama, this fully illustrated anthology of first-person accounts of disaster from Thucydides to CNN, from Pompeii to the Holocaust, is as heartbreaking as it is inspiring, as terrifying as it is fascinating.

  • 0312192649
  • 9780312192648
  • 1 December 1998
  • Thomas Dunne Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 297
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