Humans have endured a lot over the course of our existence, undoubtedly much more than can fully be explored in the confines of a 300ish page book, but Lizzie Wade’s Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures still paints a pretty rich picture of some of the most disastrous events in our history. Going back to the demise of the Neanderthals and through the various civilization-collapsing forces in the tens of thousands of years that followed — years-long droughts, plagues, colonialism, slavery — Wade examines the concept of the apocalypse through an archaeological lens, and uses all of this to put our modern crises into perspective.
Despite the subject matter, it’s not really a doom-and-gloom kind of book. After all, humans are still around. As much as it’s a story about death and destruction, it’s also about human resilience.