Chris Begley is an underwater archaeologist, a wilderness survival instructor, and a professor of anthropology at the University of Transylvania. He has worked in Central and South America and in the Mediterranean. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, USA. Pandemic, climate change, or war—our era is saturated with the scent of Doomsday. Modern films, books, and other sources are packed with terrifying fantasies about life after the apocalypse. We imagine ruined, abandoned cities and how we return to the land in a desperate attempt to survive. In his book, Chris Begley argues that our ideas about how catastrophe happens are fundamentally wrong. Using the collapse of past civilizations such as the Maya and the Western Roman Empire, the author shows that it’s not so much a collapse caused by a single cataclysm as a long process of gradual changes. Some people abandon their homes and neighbors. Others band together to start over. Most important is what happens after the event that set this reaction in motion. Begley emphasizes that the apocalypse was survived by communities and groups of people—not lone heroes. And it will be the same during the next apocalypse.