What to read this weekend: A brief history of humankind's many apocalypses
These are some recently released titles we think are worth adding to your reading list. This week, we read Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, a compelling new history book by science journalist Lizzie Wade, and Behemoth, a riveting mini-series for Dark Horse that explores the classic idea of a kaiju attack from a horrifying... inside perspective.
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. $25 at Amazon
If you've ever watched a monster movie and wondered what it'd be like for those unfortunate souls who get swallowed by the creature but aren't immediately killed in the process, this one's for you. (Surely that's not only me?) Behemoth is a mini-series by Grant Sputore, Ryan Engle and artist Jay Martin that focuses on a group of people who find themselves literally in the belly of the beast after a kaiju shows up to wreak havoc on New York City. They'd been on a bus zooming toward safety when the monster just snatches the whole thing up, plunging them into its depths. And it turns out the scariest thing on the inside isn't the lake of stomach acid.
It's a fast-paced series that wrapped up this week with its fourth issue, and I really enjoyed it. Behemoth manages to get you to care about the characters in a pretty short amount of time, and it has all of the action you'd expect from a story like this. I only wish it were a little longer. $2 at Amazon
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