Bring on the Apocalypse: Essays on Self-Destruction

A new fusillade of provocative thinking from the author of the bestselling Heat.

With Heat, George Monbiot confirmed his standing as one of the most important voices in the war against global warming. But as Bring on the Apocalypse makes clear, Monbiot is far from being a one-issue thinker. In this collection of his journalism, none of which has been published in Canada before, he tackles a wide range of issues drawn from recent headlines, and does so with his familiar fierce intelligence and superb skills as a writer.

Grouped by theme into “Arguments with” science, political power, war, religion, economics, and culture, these pieces crackle with intellectual energy and frequently give off sparks of fury. Always, though, their power is rooted in profound knowledge, a solid set of principles, and palpable sincerity. The Globe and Mail said of Heat that it “contains more intellectual challenges by the page than the Canadian media does in a year.” For Bring on the Apocalypse, with its concise, intense broadsides against everything from climate change deniers, to the fundamentalist “Christian Taliban,” to the evils of teen magazines, and what continued interest in the Loch Ness monster says about our attitude to real ones, make that “by the paragraph.”

George Monbiot has been named by the UK’s Independent on Sunday as one of the forty international prophets of the twenty-first century. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He is visiting professor in the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University.