Alex Heard
Apocalypse Pretty Soon
Travels in End-Time America
As the final countdown to the year 2000 begins, a funny and frightening look at millennial, utopian, and futuristic subcultures.
Over a ten-year period, intrepid cultural traveler Alex Heard has been sojourning among America's most intensely religious and political believers — sometimes dark, sometimes joyful, usually bizarre, and very occasionally deadly groups who bring their own all — American spin to the Biblical idea of the apocalypse.
Among the amazing cast of characters encountered: a UFO cult whose members look forward to the mass landing of Angelic Space Brothers in 2001; trembling New Age penitents who fear our polluted planet is bent on taking highly conscious revenge; a born-again Christian determined, on God's orders, to carry a twelve-foot cross across every nation on earth; life-extentionists convinced that if they can only live long enough science will make sure they'll live forever; and a rich smorgasbord of other of our most credulous, paranoid, and/or ecstatic countrymen.
Alex Heard has been in their midst and, in Apocalypse Pretty Soon, he offers a compelling mix of history, reportage, humor, and sociology — a colorful group portrait of a uniquely weird moment in American life.
Alex Heard edits and writes for the New York Times Magazine. He has also written for Outside, the New Republic, Slate, and many other publications. He lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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