How to Live Through the Apocalypse By Barbara Kiser. "As if on cue, two exceptional books have arrived to wrangle with the implications: Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time and Bradley Garrett’s Bunker: Building for the End Times. Both writers are Angelenos, with sensibilities honed in its edgeworlds, geographic and cultural. But their takes on surviving apocalypse are intriguingly different. For Garrett, the future is down, in the parallel universe of the bunker-bound underworld, unpeeled on a series of intercontinental treks. Ehrenreich takes his chances out in the open. His meditative journey splices together sojourns in the Mojave Desert with essays, some tracking the forces of capitalism and imperialism that have led us to our dead end, others indicating alternative “ways of thinking, living, seeing” that could show a way out of it." "Time haunts Bunker, too, and not just because preparing (“prepping”) for cataclysm is a race against the clock. More subtly, Garrett posits the bunker as a fortified womb, ultimately decanting inhabitants into a postapocalyptic world. His search for buyers, sellers, and the thing itself takes him from New Zealand to Utah to interview “dread merchants” hawking high-spec real estate, Mormons manufacturing doomsday-proof food, and organic farmers canning for the end times."