P&P Live!: Mark O'Connell – Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

This program is part of DUBLIN VOICES, a collaboration between Politics and Prose Bookstore, the Embassy of Ireland, Solas Nua, and Global Irish Studies.

In Notes from an Apocalypse, Mark O'Connell crosses the globe in pursuit of answers. He tours survival bunkers in South Dakota. He ventures to New Zealand, a favored retreat of billionaires banking on civilization's collapse. He engages with would-be Mars colonists, preppers, right-wing conspiracists. And he bears witness to those places, like Chernobyl, that the future has already visited—real-life portraits of the end of the world as we know it. In doing so, he comes to a resolution, while offering readers a unique window into our contemporary imagination.

Both investigative and deeply personal, this book is an affecting, humorous, and surprisingly hopeful meditation on our present moment. With insight, humanity, and wit, O'Connell leaves you to wonder: What if the end of the world isn't the end of the world?