In this, the fourth post of books classified in the 000 section, Books by the Numbers moves away from the book and the computer to subjects of controversial knowledge. More specifically, I am going to feature two books concerning the impending end of the world: A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know by Bill McGuire (001.9 McG) and Apocalypse WOW! by James Finn Garner (AC 001.9 GA), of which the latter is on book on audio cassette in our library. This is the order I suggest one read the books in, for the first one might leave you so full of despair that you will need the humor of the sound recording to cheer you up.
Actually, both books are good, fact-based accounts of the subject, though McGuire's sets it all out in a much more scholarly fashion and matter-of-fact tone. For those of you not familiar with James Finn Garner, he is the man who brought you the popular Politically Correct Bedtime Stories and its sequels. So, as you may guess, his presentation is a pretty much to the far side of tongue-in-cheek in tone. Nonetheless, both books set the wheels in your mind turning--though perhaps not in a good way!
The first book, A Guide to the End of the World, as I have said, is written in a serious tone. It deals with events that could occur bringing about the end of our race. It could well be titled How Bad Has It Been and How Bad Can It Get, which might sum it up even better. Through it all, one gains a perspective for geological time frames, the relative probabilities of unlikely things, and the eventual probabilities of other things. The book sticks to disasters of a geological, meteorological, and astronomical nature but leaves gloomy religious portents to others.
So, I say "a serious tone," but maybe what I mean is a dry, British humor. That the book is British I can readily prove: it was published by Oxford University Press, measurements in the book are given in Celsius and kilometres, and many references and allusions to the British Isles abound within. As for the dry humor, I will leave it up to readers to determine the vein in which the section at the end of each of the chapters, "Facts to Fret Over," was meant.
All in all, I enjoyed reading this book, which is a little categorically than any of the others discussed on this blog thus far. All the others have told the story of an individual or groups of individuals. This book, on the other hand, has absolutely no biographical content. It tells the story of the planet primarily, which has had more face lifts, blow-ups, and eccentricities than any celebrity could cram into one biography.
The second read--or in the case of our library, listen--we have a book that is far less ambiguously dry humor. Written in 1997 by satirist James Finn Garner, the book focuses on the more sensationalistic aspects of eschatology. The book lampoons all the end times prophesies and prophets who gained attention in the years leading up to the turn of the millennium. Along the way you may learn a thing or two about Nostradamus, the story of Atlantis, and the Book of Revelations.
The book does spend a great deal of time spoofing many of viewpoints of Christian dispensationalism fictionalized in the runaway popular series published during the same time, the Left Behind series, of which the library owns the whole series (F LA).
One thing is for certain, this week's choices have certainly added some urgency for getting my blog post published!
No comments:
Post a Comment