I accept ARCs sometimes months before they are due to publish. Notes from an Apocalypse is one of those books. Since I'm part of a post-apocalyptic book club I thought a nonfiction book might be an interesting read. The irony of reading it during a pandemic is not lost on me.

When I saw that Notes from an Apocalypse was next up on my reading list of ARCs, I thought about passing on it. I mean, we are living a kind of apocalypse right now, did I really need to read about someone else's personal journey? In end, I decided to read it because I hate not reading the ARCs I request.

While there is mention that the end of the world may come about by an illness, the main focus of the "apocalypse" for O'Connell is the slow death we are inflicting on the planet through materialism, climate change, and global extinction. The book is about his obsession with the destruction of the world.

I will admit I wasn't as enthusiastic about this book when I started reading it as I was when I requested it. And the opening chapters had what little interest I had waning. The tone of the opening chapters as he explored the prepper culture and "end of the world" retreats of the wealthy felt judgemental. It seemed that any ideology that was different than his own was bad or wrong. O'Connell even resorted to name-calling at one point ("nose-picking libertarians"). He is a self-proclaimed socialist and it felt to me that he thought capitalism is evil.

Another off-putting element was his views on America. It is one thing for me or other Americans to criticize the country, but it felt wrong for someone from another country (O'Connell is Irish) to criticize it.

When he moved more to the more personal aspects of his journey - his trip to the Scottish Highlands to commune with nature, reading The Lorax with his son, etc - the book picked up a bit for me.

Though the book deals with an apocalyptic crisis resulting from environmental degradation, his ending words could provide solace and hope to individuals living during the apocalyptic crisis caused by the current pandemic.

My review will be published at Girl Who Reads on Friday, April 24 - https://www.girl-who-reads.com/2020/04/notes-from-apocalypse-by-mark-oconnell.html

Notes from An Apocalypse was right up my alley. I'm always thinking about worst-case scenarios and what to do in any given apocalypse situation.

Fascinating, chilling, yet depressing. The author sets out to explore how various people are preparing for the possibility of an apocalypse. No zombies, or Mad Max scenarios, just people who have an overwhelming fear (I guess that's the most accurate descriptor) of the end of the world.
The author visits all kinds of people and sites. From underground bunkers in South Dakota, to New Zealand's compounds for the super-rich. Even to Chernobyl!
Extremely well-written, full of the author's wit, yet not downplaying the scenarios and his own fears for his family.
I was hoping for an ending whereby the author could reassure us, but it didn't happen. While a good ending would have satisfied me, I understand the author's take on the matter. Hopefully, "we" will never come to the point where the apocalypse comes.

I appreciated the personal touch to the narrative and the author’s experiences as he researched the terrors of modern day issues. It offers a solid addition to the many narratives about humanity’s effect on the world. I had expected this to be a bit more textbook than personal story, and the author combines the two genres well.

"Nothing could be more important—in, as it were, the end—than unflinching engagement with the reality that we as a species might be finally and irrevocably fucked."

A stunning follow-up to To Be A Machine—O'Connell's reliably exquisite prose, penetrating and perspective-shifting insights, biting humor, and heart-wrenching evocations of emotion are all masterfully deployed in this exploration of our collective eschatological unease. As someone who shares so many of his anxieties and fascinations, this is exactly the book I needed to read right now. If you, too, are obsessed with the idea of an imminent collapse of civilization, and want to explore what that actually means, I can't recommend it enough.

I've read over 300 books this year, and this may be my favorite -- even though I occasionally hated reading it.

What a brilliant, depressing, funny, fascinating, infuriating, interesting book. Just wow. This is not a book for the faint of heart, but anybody paying attention these days can't be of the faint of heart anyway. These are scary times, all the more so as a parent.

O'Connell is an Irish father of two young children who was already worried about climate change when he became rather obsessed with it and took a year to go on the world's most depressing pilgrimage to find out more about it. He takes on us this journey in Notes from an Apocalypse -- visiting underground bunkers built for the very rich in South Dakota, attending a seminar on establishing the world's (or rather, another world's) most depressing colony on Mars, meeting folks in New Zealand where Silicon Valley multi-billionaires are buying up the land as their utopian New World to escape to after the collapse of civilization (while simultaneously making plans to profit off of the world devastation), and going on a retreat to one of the only wild places left in Great Britain only to have a bomber plane fly directly overhead on its way to Syria because, as O'Connell puts it, "It was always the end of the world for someone, somewhere." He even journeys to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where he embarks on a weekend trip with a friend in order to tour the devastation of the world's worst nuclear disaster, stepping through pillaged schools and homes while other tourists take selfies in the post-apocalyptic wreckage.

O'Connell desperately loves his children, and it is partly because of this that he is driven half mad by what he is pretty certain is coming for them. As a mother of five, I relate to this to a painful degree. He is also prone to fixating and to worst case scenarios, and I can't say I differ from him there either.

As much as I was hoping that I'd get to the end of the book and he'd report that he'd been wrong all along and it was all going to be fine, that didn't happen and I didn't really expect it. The end was reassuring, not in the way I wanted but in the way that made sense.

Highly recommended.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

Considering just how much anxiety I feel about these present times in general, I was surprised by just how much I ended up enjoying “Notes from an Apocalypse.” O’Connell’s various tours to explore how different groups and people are preparing for the possible end is done so with both a critical eye and also a great deal of wit. Yet as he journeys about and makes his sharp observations, there’s always the constant undercurrent of his own very strong, and very open fears about what the future brings, often to the point where he cannot help but empathize at times with his subjects even when he finds them to be otherwise ridiculous in so many ways. It’s this honesty about his personal journey to try and reconcile himself with what lies ahead that turns a just a genuinely interesting book into a strangely therapeutic work that I think many anxious people (this reader included) can and will very much appreciate.