I’ve said before, a challenge with reading books by people whose voices you know well (in this case, podcaster Dan Carlin) is that you read their every word in the cadence of their speech. Luckily in this case it didn’t slow things down at all – which is just as well as it covers quite a lot of history: from the Assyrians right through to present day, specifically in the context of some of the main things which keeps humankind poised on the precipice of wiping itself out. Or if not humanity, then certainly civilisations. For example the Assyrian city of Nineveh – biggest city in the world for 50 years, and then following its sacking by an uprising, 200 years later nobody had any memory the place existed. What was quite unsettling though was the number of times Carlin referred to a hypothetical future pandemic, questioning what effect it would have on our modern world. The book was published at the end of October 2019.