A Is for Armageddon

With all the doom and gloom of the past couple years, you can't blame Richard Horne (author of 101 Things To Do Before You Die) for taking the piss out of the doomsday message with A Is for Armageddon: A Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World as We Know It.

As they put it over at BrainPickings,

From religious warfare to grey goo to deforestation, Horne combines science, superstition and sociology in a beautifully illustrated, delightfully dystopian guide to the apocalypse. Underlying the wickedly entertaining tone, however, is a grounded, non-preachy crusade for awareness that exudes the call of urgency none of us want to hear but all of us must.

Opening with a Table of Contents that riffs on the periodic table of the elements, this is a book that make you laugh while it educates. Lots of photos follow. Click on them to get to the full size versions where you can read the text. If you haven't had enough, be sure to check out Slavoj Žižek’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in One Minute (the Elvis of Cultural Theory only comes up with four impending catastrophes!) and, for an antidote, An Optimist's Tour of the Future.