Rating: 
Summary: Load of tripe
Review: Absolute absurdity. I read this book back in 1989 and followed the "news headlines" to compare them to actual headlines. Not even close. The air and water are cleaner and technology is making lives better.
Rating: 
Summary: Simply the best
Review: Good fiction
Rating:
Summary: Absurd when I first read it and more so now.
Review: I read this book back in 1987. I thought it was standard apocalyptic tripe then, and the fifteen years since then haven't been kind. Each section of the book began with a collection of "news clippings." The gimmick was that the first few were taken from actual, historic headlines. These were followed by fictional headlines from the "future," beginning in the early 1990s. These fictionalized headlines built on the environmental problems cited in the actual headlines. Finally, more fictional headlines from the 2010s described horrifying environmental catastrophes, such as brush fires in Southern California's Santa Monica Mountains killing thirty thousand people or thousands of people asphyxiating from smog in Denver. Of course, the 1990s didn't turn out at all like the authors' fictional version. In fact, the course of nature is going in the opposite direction: the air and water are cleaner (at least in developed countries), not dirtier, than they were when the books were written. "Environmentalists" like these two authors might as well be Branch Davidians, or die-hard Trotskyists -- always perversely excited by impending doom, and ever-eager to explain that their failed prophecies are all the more far-sighted because they haven't come true yet. There's a reason this book is out of print: it's hopelessly out of date, and intellectually bankrupty to boot. Save your [money].
Rating:
Summary: Absurd when I first read it and more so now.
Review: I read this book back in 1987. I thought it was standard apocalyptic tripe then, and the fifteen years since then haven't been kind. Each section of the book began with a collection of "news clippings." The gimmick was that the first few were taken from actual, historic headlines. These were followed by fictional headlines from the "future," beginning in the early 1990s. These fictionalized headlines built on the environmental problems cited in the actual headlines. Finally, more fictional headlines from the 2010s described horrifying environmental catastrophes, such as brush fires in Southern California's Santa Monica Mountains killing thirty thousand people or thousands of people asphyxiating from smog in Denver. Of course, the 1990s didn't turn out at all like the authors' fictional version. In fact, the course of nature is going in the opposite direction: the air and water are cleaner (at least in developed countries), not dirtier, than they were when the books were written. "Environmentalists" like these two authors might as well be Branch Davidians, or die-hard Trotskyists -- always perversely excited by impending doom, and ever-eager to explain that their failed prophecies are all the more far-sighted because they haven't come true yet. There's a reason this book is out of print: it's hopelessly out of date, and intellectually bankrupty to boot. Save your [money].
Rating:
Summary: This book changed my life!
Review: I've read this book several times, and given it away to friends. I looked the book up here because I remembered the authors' prediction about devastating fires hitting Indonesia and Brazil, burning out of control when the monsoons didn't come because of climate changes. My memory of their prediction coincides so closely with current events it is scary.
Rating:
Summary: A horryfying and plausible look at our possible future
Review: If we continue to consume and destroy as we have in the 20th century, we may face the hell that Strieber and Kunetka describe in the 21st in Nature's End. The book's dramatic elements are exciting, and the story of fugitves on the run from a sort of mutated Ghandi/Hitler hybrid is fun and though-provoking, but it is the depictions of everyday life in the 2020s with the terrifying consequences of over 100 years of environmental degradation that both enthrall and alarm. This book should be made into a movie by Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks. Maybe the attention it would thus receive will serve as a warning call to the world that we may be entering a time of living (or more likely, dying) in a poisoned planet unless we do something about it. An amazing and shocking vision of what may await us all in a few decades, many of the predictions of events in this book (written in the 80s) have come to pass with alarming accuracy.
Rating: 
Summary: Plausible predictions about our near future
Review: In 2025 the environment is on its way to being unable to support human life, and the Depopulationists are campaigning for a plan of voluntary suicide of a third of the people on earth. The air in some cities actually suffocates people. Trees are a rarity. The American Midwest is mostly desert. The gap between rich and poor has widened even further. Gerontology has developed to the point where seventy-year-olds can look and feel thirty--if they have the money. Trans-atmospheric vehicles can get you from L.A. to New York in half an hour--if you have the money. We've been tinkering with chimps, apes, and human children to enhance their intelligence, with mixed results. Drugs are available to induce any mood. The book occasionally got a bit too pedantic and polemic, and I wished the pieces of the story had been woven together more smoothly, but all in all I found it an interesting and thought-provoking read. (I also recommend Strieber and Kunetka's "Warday," which I liked even better, about the aftermath of a "limited" nuclear war. Another good book about a possible near future is David Brin's "Earth.")
Rating:
Summary: Nature's End: A Soon to be Written True Story
Review: In this book, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka attempted to warn readers of how
Mankind's remorseless corrupting of nature would come back to haunt us. Not only did he show how perhaps one day pollution and deforestation and political gridlock over
the environment would nealy nullify the planet, he also provided something not often seen
in this type of book: He provided suspense. Unlike WARDAY (The pair's previous novel)
There was a reason that the people traveled where and how they did. This book is a few years
old, but IT more than any Commercial, fact, or group scared me into worrying about the status
of Nature itself. Imagine a place where cities are so pollutted that smog is black and thicker
than any fog you have ever been in. Imagine a place where the MAPLE Tree has become extinct.
Imagine a place where once the greatest forest on the planet was, there is now a desert as large as the Sahara. This impossible menagerie of horrors is what Whitley Streiber and
James Kunetka have concocted. Read it and realize that anything is possible.
Review by Martin J. Zmiejko
Rating:
Summary: Nature's End: A Soon to be Written True Story
Review: In this book, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka attempted to warn readers of howMankind's remorseless corrupting of nature would come back to haunt us. Not only did he show how perhaps one day pollution and deforestation and political gridlock over the environment would nealy nullify the planet, he also provided something not often seen in this type of book: He provided suspense. Unlike WARDAY (The pair's previous novel) There was a reason that the people traveled where and how they did. This book is a few years old, but IT more than any Commercial, fact, or group scared me into worrying about the status of Nature itself. Imagine a place where cities are so pollutted that smog is black and thicker than any fog you have ever been in. Imagine a place where the MAPLE Tree has become extinct. Imagine a place where once the greatest forest on the planet was, there is now a desert as large as the Sahara. This impossible menagerie of horrors is what Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka have concocted. Read it and realize that anything is possible. Review by Martin J. Zmiejko
Rating:
Summary: Cliff Hanging
Review: My father recommended this book to me. I read it and now I fear the very meaning of it. If you want to be terrified everytime droughts occur or wide-spread fires erupt, read Nature's End. I would like to believe the Earth can tollerate those ungratful inhabitants. Everything has a threshold. This book is a frightening depiction of what could await if Earth's is crossed.
| 
