Is the End of the World Near?

Gr 6—9—Is our planet doomed? "The simple answer is yes," writes Miller. The only question is whether the end will come from a giant asteroid or errant black hole, a supernova's gamma ray burst or our Sun's transformation into a red giant. But these are, most likely, distant future possibilities; the human species is far more immediately vulnerable. The author devotes most of his presentation to a selective tally of our possible ends, from religious and pseudoscientific predictions (including the supposed Mayan apocalypse "scheduled" for December 21, 2012) to an array of more feasible pandemics, ecological breakdowns, nuclear conflagrations, supervolcanoes, and other natural catastrophes. He also tucks in references to prominent end-of-days novels and films, and takes his eschatological narrative to the universe-ending "Big Crunch" before closing on a perversely optimistic note. Capped with generous annotated lists of multimedia resources and illustrated throughout with dramatic photographed or digitally rendered disasters, this title may not be as earnestly thorough as Jim Willis's Armageddon Now: The End of the World A to Z (Visible Ink, 2006) or as gleefully alarming as Philip C. Plait's Death from the Skies! (Viking, 2008), both of which are aimed at older readers, but it makes intriguingly disquieting reading nonetheless.—John Peters, formerly at New York Public Library