Brief History of the End of the World

For humans everything in life and nature has a beginning, a middle and an end. And this traditional narrative structure is represented most clearly, dramatically and often bizarrely in the myriad versions of that most important end of all - the ending of the world. The expression of these end-time beliefs informs our history and our culture. In the West, most people's concept of the end of the world comes from the book of Revelation, but visions of the apocalypse existed well before the Bible and are all around us in secular society today - in politicians' speeches, Hollywood disaster movies, predictions of polar meltdown, threats of nuclear and biological warfare. From the comic antics of the seventeenth-century Ranters to the current struggle between Bush and Osama bin Laden - via the French Revolution, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Third Reich, asteroids and pop music - Pearson's exhilarating investigation shows how the apocalyptic tradition has gripped our imagination like no other and has led us into terrible conflicts and strange alliances. His conclusion is irresistible: it's our expectations of the end, rather than our origins or the status quo, that have defined the narrative of the human story. Book jacket.Pearson, Simon is the author of 'Brief History of the End of the World ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780786718252 and ISBN 0786718250.