Millennium
"Had the human race made progress or regressed? If so, how? How not? Who was the most important personage of each century in the last ten?"
I may be the only author who ever had a two book deal like this: the first about the disgraced baseball hit king, Pete Rose [Collision at Home Plate, 1991] and the second about the scientist who single-handedly ushered in the modern world [Galileo: A Life, 1994]. But the Galileo biography changed my life and career. The idea for it originated with my failed bid to be the first writer in space when I became interested in NASA’s Galileo space probe to Jupiter. Ironically, the Galileo book sold more copies than the Pete Rose book, proving only that the sports craze in America is wide but not deep, but also showing my publisher in New York that I could write about ancient history for a popular audience.
When the millennium loomed---the extraordinary moment when the calendar was to turn three zeroes---I was asked if would do a book on the last time that had happened, the year 1000 A.D. There was, of course, a good deal of talk in the air about apocalypse and the End of the World, but more about how computers would react to the advent of “Y2K.” Indeed, the paranoia about an impending computer disaster overwhelmed the possibility for a real teaching moment: to consider not only the experience of 1000 A.D. but to look at a thousand years of human history all at once.
"Boldly written. Can the last millennium enlighten the next? Reston gives us the question dipped in blood."
-Atlanta Journal-Constitution on The Last Apocalypse
Had the human race made progress or regressed? If so, how? How not? Who was the most important personage of each century in the last ten? (Galileo was my choice for the 17th century; most people chose Bill Gates for the 20th.) Was there anything in the year 1000 A.D. that could, even loosely, be called an apocalypse? And what did apocalypse mean anyway, total destruction or revelation? Would something earth-shattering or world-changing happen in the year 2000 A.D.? (9/11 a year later perhaps?) And did an apocalyptic transition have to happen in one year alone, or could one think of the year 1000 A.D. and 2000 A.D. as a hinge of time, encompassing , say, 50 years before and after?
In the nearly three years I worked on my millennium book [The Last Apocalypse, 1999], I also wrote articles on the side. Below are three essays I wrote about the questions above for George Magazine, the briefly successful magazine edited by John F. Kennedy, Jr. They appeared only a few months before he tragically died in a crash of his plane off Martha’s Vineyard in July 1999. The Washington Post piece, “We’ve Missed it!” complained about the silliness of the Y2K phenomenon. (The computers did not crash, but it was too late to reap the benefit of the history lessons I had proposed.) And in the Los Angeles Times op ed essay, I weighed the difference in the word, apocalypse, between calamity and revelation.
After the publication of The Last Apocalypse, I briefly thought that I’d do a book of ten essays on the person I thought most significant in the last ten centuries. Toward the end of the 11th century I came upon the story of the First Crusade. And then when I moved to the 12th century, there lay the fabulous story of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. Without a further thought I dropped the idea of the ten essays and proposed a book on the Third Crusade.
When the millennium loomed---the extraordinary moment when the calendar was to turn three zeroes---I was asked if would do a book on the last time that had happened, the year 1000 A.D. There was, of course, a good deal of talk in the air about apocalypse and the End of the World, but more about how computers would react to the advent of “Y2K.” Indeed, the paranoia about an impending computer disaster overwhelmed the possibility for a real teaching moment: to consider not only the experience of 1000 A.D. but to look at a thousand years of human history all at once.
"Boldly written. Can the last millennium enlighten the next? Reston gives us the question dipped in blood."
-Atlanta Journal-Constitution on The Last Apocalypse
Had the human race made progress or regressed? If so, how? How not? Who was the most important personage of each century in the last ten? (Galileo was my choice for the 17th century; most people chose Bill Gates for the 20th.) Was there anything in the year 1000 A.D. that could, even loosely, be called an apocalypse? And what did apocalypse mean anyway, total destruction or revelation? Would something earth-shattering or world-changing happen in the year 2000 A.D.? (9/11 a year later perhaps?) And did an apocalyptic transition have to happen in one year alone, or could one think of the year 1000 A.D. and 2000 A.D. as a hinge of time, encompassing , say, 50 years before and after?
In the nearly three years I worked on my millennium book [The Last Apocalypse, 1999], I also wrote articles on the side. Below are three essays I wrote about the questions above for George Magazine, the briefly successful magazine edited by John F. Kennedy, Jr. They appeared only a few months before he tragically died in a crash of his plane off Martha’s Vineyard in July 1999. The Washington Post piece, “We’ve Missed it!” complained about the silliness of the Y2K phenomenon. (The computers did not crash, but it was too late to reap the benefit of the history lessons I had proposed.) And in the Los Angeles Times op ed essay, I weighed the difference in the word, apocalypse, between calamity and revelation.
After the publication of The Last Apocalypse, I briefly thought that I’d do a book of ten essays on the person I thought most significant in the last ten centuries. Toward the end of the 11th century I came upon the story of the First Crusade. And then when I moved to the 12th century, there lay the fabulous story of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. Without a further thought I dropped the idea of the ten essays and proposed a book on the Third Crusade.
Articles:
“The Moment? We’ve Already Missed it.”
On marking the millennium, Appeared in Washington Post Outlook, October 24, 1999 view PDF "How Apocalypse Became a Dirty Word" Appeared in Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2003 view PDF "Petroglyphs" unpublished transcript, date-unknown view PDF "Revelation" unpublished transcript, date-unknown view PDF |