The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America

Written By Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles
Original Publication Date: 2011

Rating: 2 Out of Five Stars

Book Notes:

Page 23

We really did delude ourselves, as a culture, in the 90s that we were living in a never-ending Golden Age.

Page 67
The apocalypse is new to our era; the nature of Endings that were in other cultures were also Beginnings.  The cycle of living was important.  It's our understanding of history as linear and unique, rather than cyclical and mythologically repetitive that created the idea of the END.

Review:

First of all, I received this book in a Goodreads giveaway, back in ...March?  I kept trying to pick it up, I swear!  For some reason it just sat on my bedside table, totally ignored.  I'd put it on my bedside table, ignore it, put it away, rinse and repeat.

Turns out my instincts were right.  It's not really worth reading.  The first couple of chapters are very interesting.  Those chapters are a conversation of when apocalyptic thinking first existed.  In very early history, there was no history as we understand it today.  Everything was cyclical and a re-creation of a myth. Nothing ever truly ended, because it was always reborn as a beginning.  It was when humanity started thinking of history as linear, as we do today, that apocalyptic thinking was even possible.  When history was cyclical, apocalypse as was understand it today wasn't possible, but when history became a straight (random) line, we wanted to know when that line would end.

For many hundreds of years, the apocalypse-thought-process didn't even focus so much on the end, but on what came after.  Isrealites lost their homes over and over and over again, but because they believed that after the judgement day came, they'd have everything - more than they could ever have imagined - this is why they never lost hope.  The apocalyptic thought was actually a positive!

From those two points, we can very clearly see how the advent of science created an apocalyptic thought process that focuses more on the end, than on what comes after the end.

Alright, that was interesting - it really was.  I enjoyed the first 100 pages or so.  Then all of a sudden, it got repetitive.  The sentence structures felt like they'd simply been transplanted from earlier in the book.  They couldn't even bother to write new sentences!?  Copy Pasta is not how to make an interesting book.  Maybe if they'd simply focused on the history, or hell, even ended the book after those 100 pages, it would have gotten a higher rating.  But once it hit the 100 page mark, I felt like I was re-reading what had already been said.

Truth be told, I skimmed the last 50 pages or so.