Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World

By Meghann Marco

We're a culture obsessed with the end of the world. Whether it's Y2K or an asteroid barrelling towards us, the fact that 37 percent of species are set to become extinct in the next fifty years due to global warming, or weapons of mass destruction popping up in turkey farms, Armageddon might not be far off. We're also obsessed with movies, and studios have been releasing films about the end of the world as long as Hollywood has been Hollywood. Now, in FIELD GUIDE TO THE APOCALYPSE, Meghann Marco combines two of our favourite obsessions. Using information gleaned from dozens of movies wherein the unthinkable occurs, FIELD GUIDE offers practical advice on a variety of situations that may well occur as the apocalypse draws near. You'll learn how to deal with damn dirty apes (PLANET OF THE APES), how to convert a '70s muscle car to run on bathtub gin (MAD MAX), how to deal with last-woman-on-earth survival guilt, how to identify yourself as a replicant (BLADE RUNNER), and how to synthesise a species-saving vaccine from your own mucus. The FIELD GUIDE couldn't be more timely: According to Blade Runner all living animals will be genetic copies by 2019.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 068987877X
• ISBN13: 9780689878770
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.4" x 0.5" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

funniest self-help ever

If, by some chance, I should ever survive an apocalypse, I definately want this book on hand. It is useful, insightful, and, oh yeah, hilarious. Having seen the movies she references makes it all the more fun. Read it for yourself, and pass it on to friends. You'll be quoting from it in no time.

A delicate balance between humor and hysteria!

Actually, the hysteria was just me reacting to some unbelievably true little factoids I learned about our impending doom. I couldn't stop laughing-though at one point it turned to a nervous laugh due to the fact that the apocalypse is pretty much on its way and if we don't wake up, gear up, and put on our alien-seeing 80s sunglasses, then we're all screwed. The apocalypse is a scary subject, but it's a nice to know that if we should happen to come under an invasion from weird, green, anti-water alien people, we can always send Boy George to try to work things out. We'll probably be zapped to hell but at least we can go out with a smile. Good call Ms. Marco. Keep the good stuff coming.

Arizona Daily Star rave review

By Phil Villarreal Arizona Daily Star If the movies have taught us anything, it's that the apocalypse will most definitely arrive. When it does, we're going to need a 1970s muscle car to get through all the explosions and mad dashes against warlords. When the day is nigh, it will also help to acquire a canine sidekick and a cache of weapons. "Field Guide to the Apocalypse: Movie Survival Skills for the End of the World" ($10.36), by former video-store manager Meghann Marco, pragmatically guides you through the ins and outs of identifying and surviving false utopias, alien invasions and weather cataclysms. Under the guise of a how-to book, "Field Guide" emerges as rapacious satire that takes the whole of action and sci-fi film history and shapes it into an oddly constructed world with its own arbitrary rules and regulations, to be joyfully torn apart by Marco's snappy, fluid prose. A must-read for any film fanatic, the guide plunders contradictions and clichés, taking preposterous movie science at its own level and holding it up for ridicule. A vein of hilarious nostalgia courses through the pages, as we learn how not to be replaced by a robot in the vein of "Blade Runner," as well as how to identify if our food is people ("Soylent Green"). The gamut of popcorn movies is covered and comedically splintered, ranging from "Metropolis" (1927) to "Signs" (2002) and slapdown of the midlife crises by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that caused them to re-edit their classics. With wit, intense observation, occasional flashes of raw anger and reserves of accessible film knowledge, Marco makes her points with a flourish in a page-turner that demands to be read in one sitting. - Contact reporter Phil Villarreal at 520-573-4130 or prv@azstarnet.com

Love in the Ruins

It's always inspiring when someone you know gets her very own ISBN, especially if it's for a book that's funny, even moreso if it's intentionally funny. After watching scads of end-of-the-world flicks, Meghann Marco (of MeghannMarco.com, wtf) has written the book that is bound to continue to inspire even after our planet's doomsday -- I predict it will inspire fights to the death among the coming apocalypse's more intelligent would-be survivors (i.e., those outside of Tim LaHaye's readership). Though it's inspired by films, Meghann's book is packed surprisingly full with Actual Information, some of which doesn't even have to wait for the Apocalypse in order to be true. For example, though she's talking about survival in Arctic conditions, "a lot of work means a lot of death" is undeniable by anyone who's ever done much of it. At least one tip has clearly been studied by the U.S. military: "If you don't understand what the informant is saying, keep kneeing him in the stomach until he says, `Okay, okay, okay' and speaks English. Everybody speaks English if you knee them in the stomach enough."