Alan’s book in Slate top 50

Slate has selected Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman’s 2007 bestseller The World Without Us as one of the top 50 English-language nonfiction books of the last 25 years.

Book critics Dan Kois and Laura Miller write: “We are a culture intoxicated by apocalypse and ruin, forever telling one another stories about what we’d do to survive should civilization as we know it collapse. But what if humanity itself went poof and left behind the entire apparatus of our existence without a single soul remaining to start over? That is the irresistible premise of Weisman’s book, a thought experiment substantiated by deep research into what it takes to keep the built world functioning and what has happened in the few places (Chernobyl, the Korean Demilitarized Zone) where there has been no one around to prop it up.”

The experiment, they conclude, is “executed with a methodical bravado that’s breathtaking.”

Read the complete story here.