This book makes Tug a little wary. And well it should. Apocalypse 2012 is chock-a-block full of reasons to start stockpiling survival gear.
Or exhausting all your savings and maxing out your credit cards, ’cause you might as well party hardy for our final two years of civilization.
If you buy into it, that is.
If you drink that particular kinda kool-aid, that is.
Author Lawrence E. Joseph’s premise that civilization ends in 2012 is based on the fact that the ancient Mayan calendar inexplicably stops in 2012. (Actually, 12/21/12 to be precise, which is 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan Long Count calendar-whatever the F that is.)
Then Mr. Joseph spends 237 pages examining scenarios and building rationale to support this end-of-it-all date.
Didn’t we just go through this in 2000?
(Oh wait. Larry debunks the Y2K comparison early on by calling it “nothing but a transition from a digitally unremarkable number to a nice big round one.”- hey, we can’t have old doom and gloom challenging the creds of his new doom and gloom, now can we?)
So anyway.
From overdue mass extinction to increasing sunspot activity to a crack in the earth’s magnetic field to a supervolcano under Yellowstone Park getting ready to blow to the interstellar energy cloud that our solar system is getting ready to enter, Larry presents argument after argument that 2012 is going to be one wild ride.
But ya know what? Maybe because I’m intellectually impotent and not that smart, I’m not so sure.
It just seems that, like so many books of this genre, there appears to be an over abundance of author supported data and a suspicious lack of contradictory theory and facts.
Which is fine.
But add to that the fact that Larry claims in his own introduction that he himself doesn’t think that December 21, 2012 will mark the end of the world and that all he’s trying to do is present the facts and you get the feeling that maybe all he’s really trying to do is sell books.
Which is fine too.
So. When all’s said and done, Apocalypse 2012 is interesting in all the ways that strangely, weirdly coincidental stuff is always strangely and weirdly interesting, but I’m not gonna be stockpiling beer and dog food just yet.
Next up- American Nomads by Richard Grant
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