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Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World
 
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Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans are Looking Forward to the End of the World (Paperback)

by Nicholas Guyatt (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Ebury Press (3 Jul 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0091910889
  • ISBN-13: 978-0091910884
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 632,834 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

Journeying to the dusty heartlands of America's Bible Belt, Nicholas Guyatt goes in search of the truth behind a startling statistic: 50 million Americans believe the apocalypse will take place in their own lifetimes. They're convinced that, any day now, Jesus will snatch up his followers and spirit them to heaven. For the rest of us, things are going to get very nasty indeed: massive earthquakes, devastating wars, not to mention the terrifying rise of the Antichrist. But true believers aren't just sitting around waiting for the Rapture. They're getting involved in debates over abortion, gay rights and even foreign policy.Are they devout or deranged? Why do they seem so cheerful about the end of the world? And, given the disturbing involvement of a leading presidential candidate, does their influence stretch beyond the Bible Belt ...perhaps even to the White House? Strange, funny and unsettling in equal measure, "Have a Nice Doomsday" uncovers the apocalyptic obsession at the heart of the world's only superpower.


About the Author

Born and brought up in the UK, Nicholas Guyatt spent seven years in the United States - first as a PhD student at Princeton and then as a lecturer in Princeton's Department of History - prior to teaching American History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His book on US foreign policy, Another American Century, was published by Zed Books in 2000, and he is a regular reviewer for the London Review of Books. He divides his time between Canada and London.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable read, 14 Sep 2008
By L. Morley (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This is a worthwhile, frustrating, meaty, enjoyable read - a set of contradictions worth navigating for Guyatt's excellent prose and fascinating content.
The book's success hinges on Guyatt's terrific writing: understated but engaging, quietly opinionated but never disrespectful. Much of the text reprises interviews he held with luminaries of the American religious right and apocalyptic Christian movement, and he does a fine job of communicating the sense of these meetings as well as their content. You're left with a feel for how it must be to chat with these people: personable, convincing men, who believe some surprising and terrifying things.

But in Guyatt's success here lies the book's chief dissatisfaction: this is, in part, a failed attempt to understand why people develop an apocalyptic view. His analysis is extensive but never complete. He nails the tensions in his subjects' worldviews - their conflicting beliefs, for example, that the US is prophesied to fall and that it is a Godly nation worth fighting for - but he comes up in every interview against a hardcore of impenetrable faith, impossible to contextualize or to deconstruct. Guyatt gets pulled up sharply every time the folksy, hospitable, reasonable guy to whom he's talking casually mentions that the Antichrist could emerge from the auspices of the UN, or that he expects a pan-Islamic army to descend on Israel and be vaporized by God. Guyatt can't explain how his interviewees come by these beliefs: he's not seduced by them himself, neither is the reader, so at the end we're left with a disturbing portrait of a powerful, basically incomprehensible group with their fingers in every important political pie.

Perhaps the book's title and strapline are its handicaps. They're funny, all right - they capture the book's dry humour and its mastery of a popular tone (no small feat for an academic as obviously serious as Guyatt). But, to paraphrase Vonnegut, 'there is no why' in all this - you'll finish the book not knowing what these beliefs mean or where they come from, but well unsettled as to how they can influence American policy and politics.
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