[REVIEW] Otto Friedrich's The End of the World

[rfmcdonald]

Although Seekers Books (509 Bloor Street West) is run by Larouchites, I've been known to patronize them whenever they have books that I want, titles like the trade paperback edition of Otto Friedrich's The End of the World: A History (New York: Fromm, 1986). Back when I was a student at Charlottetown Rural High School in the mid-1990s, I was impressed by Friedrich's survey in serial of different situations where old certainties broke and it seemed as if the world might end entirely: the sack of Rome by the Goths, the crushing of Occitania in the Albigensian Crusade, the Black Death, Protestant apocalypticism in early 16th century Germany, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Russian revolution of 1905, the negation of morality at Auschwitz. It climaxed with an epilogue examining the mechanics of a Soviet-American nuclear war, that conflict which would be waged with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons as if the military brass on both sides of the Cold War wanted to try to exterminate the cockroach in the Northern Hemisphere. I'd looked for it after I left Charlottetown Rural, but I couldn't find it. Only a couple of weekends ago did I see the book's inimitable spine and realize that I had the author's name down wrong. Now, it's a foot and a half from the keyboard where I type, and I am pleased.