A short historical past of humankind’s many apocalypses

People have endured lots over the course of our existence, undoubtedly way more than can absolutely be explored within the confines of a 300ish web page guide, however Lizzie Wade’s Apocalypse: How Disaster Reworked Our World and Can Forge New Futures nonetheless paints a fairly wealthy image of a number of the most disastrous occasions in our historical past. Going again to the demise of the Neanderthals and thru the varied civilization-collapsing forces within the tens of hundreds of years that adopted — years-long droughts, plagues, colonialism, slavery — Wade examines the idea of the apocalypse by way of an archaeological lens, and makes use of all of this to place our fashionable crises into perspective.

Regardless of the subject material, it is not likely a doom-and-gloom form of guide. In any case, people are nonetheless round. As a lot as it is a story about demise and destruction, it is also about human resilience.