By Rebecca Priestley
Te Herenga Waka University Press (2023)
For those of us who came of age during the 1980s, watching young people grapple with the existential threat of climate change is a dose of déjà vu. Like global heating, back then the threat of nuclear war begged the question: how do you go about growing up when the world is about to end?
Part memoir, part travelogue, part science journalism, Rebecca Priestly’s End Times examines this question from several angles. It jumps between her teens, when Rebecca and her best friend Maz coped by dabbling in punk, Christianity and early versions of conspiratorial thinking (in those days it was barcodes and EFTPOS machines), and the present. Now adults, the two embark on a road trip down the West Coast, where rising sea levels and the imminent rupture of the Alpine Fault frame Rebecca’s reckoning with her past.
End Times is a must-read examination of how and why we humans so often act in a way that only hurts ourselves.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
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