In these years of war, high gas prices, political upheaval, economic meltdown, and frightening weather, Americans find themselves united across party lines in a way that many people don’t realize: Right or Left, Republican or Democrat, we’re all waiting for the Big Collapse, “TEOTWAWKI”—the end of the world as we know it.

Sure, Lefties like to laugh at the nutjobs who were waiting for the May 21 rapture, the dittoheads who hang on the Beck/Limbaugh narrative of American decline and fall, or the paranoids on YouTube who rant about the New World Order. Meanwhile, the Left has its own prophets of doom—and it seems that many of them are named Jim: James Howard Kunstler, who gives his prediction of a peak-oil apocalypse in The Long Emergency and World Made by Hand; climatologist James Hansen, who has sounded the alarm on carbon emissions and coal; and James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, who has predicted that billions will die in the coming environmental meltdown, to name a few. Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond and self-aggrandizing author Michael Ruppert each put out works sounding the alarm for the coming Collapse. There’s Vanity Fair’s Cullen Murphy, who has wondered Are We Rome? There are zombies: The immense popularity of The Walking Dead and other zombie media reflects our anxiety about a future where civilization has broken down.

Since Americans long ago traded manual skills and practical know-how for consumerism, many of us feel we need an instruction manual or two to play around with survivalism while life is still easy and Walmart is still open. There is no shortage of such books, but Wendy Brown’s Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs (New Society, softcover) has to be one of the more entertainingly titled, if not one of the more substantive. Over the course of 22 chapters, Brown addresses topics in a “survival list for the thrivalist”: stocking the pantry, growing food, collecting tools, and preparing for education in an energy-starved world, among others. It reads like Brown’s blog or journal about discovering self-sufficient living. But the book offers little in the way of technical details—and one would think that details are what you want if you’re trying to build a composting toilet. Surviving the Apocalypse might have value as an eye-opener for people who had never considered converting their yards to gardens, making soap and reusable sanitary napkins, or raising rabbits for pelts, food, and fertilizer. But for those who are really intent on surviving the apocalypse, book purveyors like Rodale, Chelsea Green Publishing, Storey Publishing, and New Society have released many far more useful tomes.

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