A New York Times Bestseller

The creator of the wildly popular podcast, Hardcover History, looks at some of the apocalyptic moments from the past to frame the challenges of the future.

Do tough times create tougher people? Can humanity handle the power of its weapons without destroying itself? Will human technology or capabilities ever peak or regress? No one knows the answers to such questions, but no one asks them in a more interesting way than Dan Carlin.

In The End Is Always Near, Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy—that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did. Will our world ever become a ruin for future archaeologists to dig up and explore? The questions themselves are both philosophical and like something out of The Twilight Zone.

Employing his trademark mix of storytelling, history, and weirdness that makes his podcast, Hardcover History, so popular, Carlin connects the past and future in fascinating and colorful ways, asking us to consider the most important issue imaginable: human survival.

Idiosyncratic and erudite, offbeat yet profound, The End Is Always Near offers a fresh take on issues that are rarely presented with such clarity of context, and makes the past immediately relevant to our very turbulent present.