The Next Apocalypse The Art and Science of Survival by Chris Begley

​  I’m all about apocalyptic books, fiction of nonfiction. The world is ending anyway, according to the news. It’s just doing it slowly and stupidly. The books, at least, do it in an exciting fashion.
  Well, maybe not all books. Certainly not this one. This is more of a sociopolitical and socioeconomic take on apocalypse, presented in a highly partisan left wing heavily didactic manner by a very well meaning altruist who seems to be very proud of being an archeologist.
    Seriously, if I had a dollar for every sentence in this book that he started with the words As an archeologist…well, there’d be a lot of dollars.  Mind you, the man is also an anthropologist, but this is only a sentence starter once and seems almost like a typo.
    At any rate, the author is well educated in the and experienced in the fields of archeology and anthropology, so his views are both informed and well formed. And, of course, he is absolutely right to castigate the right for all they’ve done to grease the wheels of the coming apocalypse train, from climate change deniers to whatever the f*ck the last 5 years have been.
     But, having that been said, as a book this didn’t do much for me. I didn’t care for the overbearing self righteously idealistic tone very much. And I really didn’t enjoy the repetitiveness with which the author belabored his ideas. Over and over and over again and it’s like, ok, already, that nail is hammered, continue.
     I’m also not sure I entirely agree with his ideology, though he makes compelling arguments. For instance, in the first section of the book he argues that civilizations do not collapse, they merely evolve…or devolve would be more accurate and the remnants assimilate with the majority at the time. So Mayan civilization in his view did not collapse, it just diminished dramatically and the rest of the Mayan people went to live among the other locals.
     I mean, for me, if a civilization no longer has their customary way of life (their cities, sacrifice slabs, etc.) and the population gets reduced by something like 90%...that’s a freaking collapse.
    But ok. Next up, the author argues that apocalypse is different for different people. For someone in Central America (or presumably any other third world country) EMP or something like that wouldn’t be a tragedy, they might not have had electricity to begin with.
     And this is a huge thing with him too, most of his ideology is based on going from Kentucky to Chicago to South America (kinda civilized to properly civilized to barely civilized) and all the concomitant culture clash and adjustments. Mind you, apparently, he loved it down there, went properly native, even married a local. (And boy, is this repeated in some form or another and frequently verbatim throughout the book.) Learned lot of survival skills too, more on this later.
    But the thing is that’s also not ideal. And that’s also a form of collapse and something most people (not brave survivors of Central American privation, but many others) would dread. Frankly, Central Americans might not be huge fans of this lifestyle ether. After all, huge numbers of them risk their lives and limbs just to get out of there and come to one of those countries that EMP would, in fact, devastate.
     And then, of course, as a well meaning liberal the author goes on to pontificate how cooperation in an apocalyptic situation would be the key to survival. And, should the civilization indeed collapse, how people should stay put and help one another. Which is a bewilderingly naïve and one sided perspective.
    And this is from a man who actually appears to have some skills in surviving on his own, enough to teach a course about it. There’s some of that in the book, which makes up the only incontrovertibly practical portion of it.
    Overall, this wasn’t at all the book I expected or was hoping for. It dragged at times accordingly.
    This is the book on the apocalypse the PC police would write, if they took the time to write books instead of sitting around making up stupid rules. The political correctness of the text is overwhelming. Granted, some of it is interesting, like the malecentric paternalistic attitudes in apocalyptic fiction and movies. Like I said, the author makes some interesting arguments. But they are so overbaked and, frankly, use precisely the sources they need to support them.
    Can the Walking Dead (arguably some of the greatest apocalyptic fiction and definitely the greatest apocalypse tv show ever) be presented to support such an argument because of Rick Grimes’ many years of leadership? Well, sure. But arguably, Michonne is just as good and some of the female antagonists on the show have outshone the guys, for sure. Alpha is infinitely creepier and scarier than the Governor.
    But this is a digression and as much as I’d love to discuss WD, this review is already much too long.
   So to sum up, I didn’t love this book.  I’m not sure I liked it all that much either. It frustrated me with its repetitive writing style and its overdone political message. I didn’t necessarily love the author’s tone and his overfond experiences of being, essentially, a poverty tourist, albeit with a prolonged work based stay, in a small third world village got tiresome. Only a first world person would get such a kick out of sh*tting in the wild and forgoing modern conveniences in general. That’s why they invented camping.
     Then again, he makes some interesting thought provoking arguments and the book was informative at times (such as survival gear) so it wasn’t a total waste of time either. I’m going to go back to Walking Dead, though, for apocalypse entertainment and mental prep.
     Other readers might get more out of this one. Thanks Netgalley.