Notes from an Apocalypse

I turned down the sound on my phone so as not to attract my son s attention, his inexorable questions. He was three then, and our relationship in those days took the form of an endless interrogation.

 

A text at the bottom of the screen explained that the footage was shot near an abandoned Inuit village in the northern Canadian tundra, where the bear had strayed in search of food, the population of seals, its usual food source, having been drastically diminished by the effects of climate change.

 

My soul remained uncrushed, my heart more or less unwrenched. I felt instead a creeping disgust at the footage itself, at the manner of its presentation ­the lachrymose music, the stately pace of the editing ­which seemed designed to elicit in me a recognition of my own contribution to this terrible situation, together with a virtuous and perhaps even redemptive swelling of sorrow, of noble sadness at the ecological destruction in which I myself was playing a role. It occurred to me then that the disgust I felt was the symptom of a kind of moral vertigo, resulting from the fact that the very technology that allowed me to witness the final pathetic tribulations of this emaciated beast was in fact a cause of the animal s suffering in the first place. The various rare-­earth minerals that were mined for the phone s components in places whose names I would never be required to learn; the fuels consumed in the course of its construction, its shipping halfway across the world, its charging with electrical current on a daily basis: it was for the sake of all this, and in my name, that the bear was starving and dragging itself across the rocky ground.

 

The slapstick capering of the cartoon bear my son was watching on the television screen and, above his head, the awful distress of the real bear on the smaller screen: the absurd juxtaposition of these images, simultaneously summoned from the ether and vying for attention, generated a strange emotional charge, a surge of

impermanence of human life in the age of climate decline Deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects.
Esquire

"In a chain of charming, anxious, and tender essays, O'Connell examines his own apocalyptic frame of mind Notes from An Apocalypse is a reminder to ask what else we can be and for whom in the meantime."
NPR

[A] poet laureate of human frailty, quixoticism, and creativity as they manifest in the technologic age.
The Millions

"Smart and surprisingly fun...A thoughtful reflection on why we prepare for the end of everything."
GQ

O Connell s prose is lucid and elegant [and] for a book on anxiety, apocalypse, and death, it s very funny . O Connell s personal conclusion, orbiting the purpose he finds in love for his wife and young children, is deeply moving.
Volume 1 Brooklyn

"A timely tour of preparing for the worst...Notes From an Apocalypse isn t meant to be a response to any particular event; it s an exploration of a sensibility...A funny, self-deprecating inquiry into [O'Connell's] own complicity."
The New York Times

O Connell s book reaffirms something that feels endangered it s still worthwhile to reject nihilism and turn toward joy.
Wired

"Both wildly funny and oddly moving."
Ed Caesar, The Guardian

"An eerily prescient mix of confession, political critique, meditation and comic monologue on living in the face of death... In this reflective, hilarious and disturbing page-turner, O Connell makes a compelling case that connecting with nature and each other is the best way to calm our apocalyptic dread and it might even increase our prospects of avoiding the worst."
Nature

O Connell is a wry and skeptical stand-in for the reader. There is a comfort in his prose. You get the sense this writer is taking time to order his experience, to bring coherence to his anxieties and, by extension, to some of mine.
Boston Globe

"O Connell has a rare ability to be blokeish and woke, funny and frightened and sound: this is a profoundly intelligent book."
Anne Enright, The Guardian

Life-affirming A contribution to the doom-and-gloom genre that might actually cheer you up.
Kirkus

"O'Connell is not only a sharp observer but a master at parsing the various subtexts underneath the surface rhetoric of these apocalyptic movements. This witty, profound, and beautifully told story will appeal to doomsday worriers and nonworriers alike."
Library Journal (starred review)

Relatable, often funny, and ultimately hopeful A more-than-companionable guide, O'Connell sets out to understand how we live under constant threat of climate change and political terror, and finds that the answer is, more or less, we do.
Booklist

A fascinating insight into a species obsessed with its own demise and into the ways humankind is trying to confront the hard-to-bear reality of climate change Oddly uplifting.
The Economist

Delightful A wryly amusing tour of the end of the world.
Financial Times

A wise meditation on social collapse and those preoccupied with the thought of it The book is full of wry humor, and O Connell is an earnest, self-effacing narrator.   
Washington Independent Review of Books

O Connell s tender, amused evocation of father love is one of the best things about the book and a vivid reminder of how high the stakes are...Imagine a cross between Bill Bryson and David Foster Wallace.
The Times (UK)

The brilliance of this book lies in the analysis. O Connell is bitingly clever...[But] the best parts of the book are the personal ones...This is ultimately, surprisingly, a hopeful book...It is brilliantly done.   
Sunday Times (UK)

It can t be overstated what witty, thoughtful company O Connell is when exploring these peculiarly 21st-century dilemmas.
Daily Mail (UK)

"A book that s fretful, wise, and funny, and often all three in the space of a paragraph [O Connell] is doing good work in difficult times. He offers us hope as well as black humour."
Daily Telegraph (Ireland)

"One hell of a funny book. A beautiful writer with a keenly honed sense of self-deprecation and the absurd, the tangents he wanders off on are just as fascinating as the subjects he meets A must-read."
Irish Independent (Ireland)

"Mark O'Connell's voice is funny, charming, and humane, even as he contemplates the grimmest outcomes of the 21st century climate catastrophe. Notes from an Apocalypse is funny and endlessly thought-provoking, like Dante's Inferno, if Hell was full of libertarian Tech bros, YouTube survivalists and guys who are really into extreme camping."
Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins