The End of the World - Hardcover

"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 Hogan

The end of the world, this varied and often vivid anthology reminds us, has always been largely a matter of personal interpretation. If one's society seems to be collapsing, this must inevitably mean that the larger world is tottering, too. Lapham, the editor-in-chief of Harper's magazine, has assembled brief reports from a variety of disasters (ranging from the biblical account of the destruction of Sodom up to the collapse of the Soviet empire) that offer firsthand impressions of the impact of natural and man-made disasters on society. Drawing from histories, letters, memoirs, and period reports, Lapham's anthology reminds us how important a role disaster has had in circumscribing a civilization's influence (from Rome to Russia). It also offers an often moving record of the way in which humans have struggled to deal with everything from invasions to the Holocaust. Lapham's decision to focus on gifted writers (a roster that includes Thucydides, Boccaccio, John Donne, Voltaire, the Shelleys, Karl Marx, Henry Adams, Sigmund Freud, and Primo Levi) makes for a particularly readable collection, though one somewhat lacking in a feel for the experience of ordinary humans in a time of woe. Nonetheless, an intriguing and stimulating collection. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.