Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Being a writer of fiction that tends to the dark side - crime, horror, dystopia - I’m a big fan of popular science and history books that look at things that reflect such interests. So it was that I came across Dan Carlin’s The End is Always Near, a history book that looks at moments in history of near apocalypse.

Based on a popular podcast, which I must confess to having never heard, Carlin’s book is split into chapters, each of which focusses on a different event. For example, and to give an idea of the scope of the book, we have a chapter on the Fall of the Roman Empire, another on the plague, and another on the use of nuclear weapons.

I found this book illuminating and a fascinating read. I learnt a lot too and felt that while each subject might be covered in more detail in more specialist books, it gave an entertaining and thought-provoking overview.

This is a book that is both cautionary and optimistic. Time and again we learn of human hubris. While apocalyptic thought has been a feature of human imagination down the centuries - from religious texts such as the Book of Genesis, through literature and film - none of these societies that actually faced it ever really felt that they were on the cusp of a disaster. But equally, it is undeniable that we are better prepared than ever to deal with some of the challenges we face (for example, we know more about epidemiology than ever and thus are more able to staunch epidemics of disease).

This is a fascinating collection of popular history and I highly recommend it.

Based on a podcast, this is an interesting jump into the world of history, but not quite as we known it. Dan Carlin examines some of the disasters of our history to determine their likelihood of ever happening again, as well as how they occurred in the first place. It’s grand scale history, sweeping us through the ages and inviting the reader to think about the what ifs and near misses of our pasts.

At times I found the subject matter a little dry and heavy going, requiring a bit more thought and concentration than I originally intended. Several times I had to put it down and leave it for a while so that I could appreciate and digest what I’d just read as I felt it didn’t really ‘flow’ well. I also thought that at times it was a little too broad, trying to tackle too much without any great depth of content. The subject matter also isn’t really that memorable.

Ok for what it is, and provides a good soundboard for the reader to seek out further information, but I wouldn’t call it particularly insightful.

This is a very interesting look at history on a macroscale in terms of how mankind has come continuously close to large scale extinction in many ways yet somehow gets away with it, and whether that lucky streak can or will continue. Only problem with the book is that the proof version is very hard to format so the huge number of footnotes sometimes makes it feel like you are randomly reading pages out of order. I am sure the final version gets round that issue so worth looking at.

A fascinating read a look at how the past ties us to the future,How major events past& present are entangled.A thoughtful well written book#netgalley

I don't really do podcasts; as a rule, I'd rather read something at my own speed than listen to it. So when a noted podcaster, here of Hardcore History, has the courtesy to transfer to my preferred format, it seems only fair that I should take a look at the result. Alas, it does not get off to a good start; the preface is only ten pages long but I still lost count of the number of times he says that considering the idea our civilisation could collapse, as so many have in the past, seems like something out of science fiction! Or fantasy! I mean...does it? It was common currency as a notion long before either of those genres was defined. And even if it does, why do you have to keep repeating it quite so often? All of which slightly hyper tone left me concerned that this was going to be the 'Listen up bitches, it’s time to learn incorrect things about someone you’ve never heard of' school of history, extended to book length – a thing this poor battered world really doesn't need. And...well, in its defence, at least it isn't that. But in the first two chapters, we barely got past repeated illustrations that things were different in the past, and people reacted to them differently. Who knew, eh? Now, there is a place for that. I mean, I still giggle occasionally at the memory of that Tumblr post asking if Rasputin had done something problematic. A mate told me he'd seen something about Leopold II of Belgium being cancelled, which I would once have said seemed as superfluous as unfollowing Hitler, if we hadn't somehow ended up in an era where following Hitler got cool again. For someone who's literally never read a history book, this might conceivably be useful. But I do mean that 'literally', because I'm pretty sure even once I was a handful of Ladybirds in I'd have been giving the level of insight here some side-eye.


As for the writing...dear heavens. Maybe this stuff sounds better spoken? Maybe he's one of those people with a voice which can make the 'phone directory sound good? Because on the page, the syntax is screaming. Consider:

"Today, a first-class power might suffer casualties from a single incident that number in the dozens – perhaps from the mechanical failure of a helicopter, or maybe a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED). Compare this with the hundreds of thousands of casualties the United States experienced in the Second World War – at Iwo Jima, for example, the thirty-six day conflict left nearly seven thousand Americans dead, of at least twenty-six thousand total casualties. And that's just American numbers; imagine the millions of casualties suffered by the Germans, or the tens of millions suffered by the Chinese and Soviets. It's interesting speculate how we today would react to such mortality."

So we've moved from a single incident, to a given battle, to the entire conflict, then given it all a bit of a stir, just to make sure we're definitely not comparing like to like, and any results are thus guaranteed to be utterly meaningless. Or how about this:

"For mothers who couldn't produce milk or had died in childbirth, the wet nurse filled a real need"

There's a valid, if obvious, point in there. But the phrasing is such as to imply undead mothers hanging around the Columna Lactaria, looking to hire. Then you get this one:

"The Spartans of 380 BCE might not have beaten their very formidable grandfathers of 480 BCE, but the Spartans of 280 BCE would definitely not have beaten their grandfathers."

Now, I'm past peak fighting age, and a century ago my grandfather was a child. And generations in modern Britain run longer than they did in ancient Greece. So you've got a history book done by someone who can't even manage a back-of-the-beermat generations-per-century figure without royally fucking it up. But I think my favourite might be the footnote "*DeMause thinks child-rearing practices may indeed be capable of affecting a nation's foreign policy." This is attached to the asterisk in a paragraph explaining who DeMause is and what he thinks about the effect of child-rearing practices on a nation's foreign policy, and thus seems fundamentally not to get what footnotes do. Yes, this is a proof copy from Netgalley, and possibly some of this will be ironed out in the final version. But seriously, this would be the sort of proof where you end up leaving so much red ink on it you can't even understand your own annotations, and it's basically better to just start again, even if you do risk losing searing insights like "In our defense, we could probably say that we did the best we could knowing what we know now – but that's also what our ancestors would have said."


But then the third chapter, just when I was about to bail on the whole sorry enterprise, is really quite good on the Bronze Age collapse, and maybe it's having a specific starting point, rather than vague catch-alls like toughness or child-rearing, that Carlin needs. He makes sound, not painfully obvious points on stuff like iron not being the total upgrade on bronze as which it's sometimes portrayed, just better in enough specific requests. That's followed by more sound chapters, on the fall of Nineveh, and the cycle whereby barbarians settle down and stop being seen as barbarians by themselves or others, just in time to get menaced by the next lot of barbarians. Yes, it's still not perfect: he uses 'administrate' when 'administer' would do perfectly well, 'Roman citizens' is applied in a modern sense of 'people living under Roman rule' rather than the far more limited and precise one of the time, and dear heavens he can't stop comparing anything slightly out of the everyday experience of a modern American to science fiction (which is ironic, given the ridiculous simpleton potentate, and the regular massacres treated as unavoidable hazards of modern life, look a lot that way to the rest of us). The chapter on 20th century nuclear jeopardy, the book's longest, is nailbiting even when one knows how it went down (spoiler: we're still here, for now). Yes, it has footnotes saying things which have already been explained elsewhere in the text, and yes, in saying the Cuban missile crisis was likely the closest the world came to nuclear war, Carlin inexplicably doesn't even nod towards Able Archer, a brush with Armageddon which was all the closer for not taking place in the world's gaze. And as for the aside that Americans haven't elected a bald man president since Eisenhower...well. So yes, there would still be plenty of times to get the red pen out. But this stuff is leaps and bounds ahead of those opening chapters, so why are they even here? Were they a warm-up exercise that didn't get taken out? Could they not at least have been shifted later in the book? Because Carlin says that the chapters are more or less discrete, and at least that way they wouldn't have tempted readers to bail on the book early, as I very nearly did. Which, while the rest of it is by no means perfect, would be a shame.

The End Is Always Near - a rather pessimistic, but oddly fitting, title for a book about some of the key moments in human history. I confess never having listened to Dan’s podcast, but the concept here grabbed me straight away - an exploration of some the most catastrophic (or near catastrophic) moments in human history, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Plague, the destruction of the Assyrian Empire to the use of atomic weapons.

The thread - the moments we got near to human destruction - allows Carlin to cover some of the biggest topics from history in an interesting way. What was responsible for each disaster, and is there a thread of recurring issues and human folly that’s responsible?

Tackling so many big historical questions means it has to be done slightly superficially, but when each topic could be a book in itself, sacrifices have to be made to cover this kind of breadth.

Overall, this was an interesting, enjoyable read with an entertaining but informative narrative voice. Maybe slightly too many footnotes though!

It’d serve as a great introduction to some key moments in history for beginners, and offers just enough breadth and details that even a history graduate found something he hadn’t even touched on before (the Assyrian Empire in my case).