Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

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Doom sans gloom in financial parody

It’s the End of Days — and things couldn’t be more lucrative. Forget about being raptured up to heaven (because chances are you won’t be so lucky) and start thinking about, that’s right, your investments!

Forget the Good Book, too, or really any other book, because “How to Profit from the Coming Rapture: Getting Ahead When You’re Left Behind” is all you’ll need to not only survive but thrive during the seven years of famine, brimstone, calamities and, oh right, death, during the Tribulation and Second Coming. The tongue-in-cheek comedic investment guide by fictional doomsday financial experts Steve and Evie Levy (creations of Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman) might not actually give you any helpful tips or ever even see the coming Rapture, but it is 200-plus pages of absurdity, blasphemy and goddamned satire.

Giving you chapter-by-chapter advice on how to financially profit from each phase of the six seals, seven trumpets, seven thunders and seven bowls of the Tribulation, “How to Profit from the Coming Rapture” helps you make important decisions such as whether you should accept the 666 Antichrist Mark? or fake it, what to invest in and when (canned tuna, beans and peanut butter are safe bets.), and how to not only identify the Antichrist before anyone else but financially exploit his celebrity before it’s unveiled that he’s, you know, evil incarnate.

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The book is further supplemented by an extensive timeline of the last (and richest!) seven years of your — and everyone else’s — life; several crude, hilarious pictures and diagrams to further illustrate how to thicken your wallets; and a FAQ (Fearfully Asked Questions) section at the end of each chapter to answer any doubts plaguing the reader, who is likely facing much graver plagues if the Rapture is truly upon them.

A hilarious, light read marked with a snarky matter-of-fact attitude, “How to Profit from the Coming Rapture” dances carefree on the line of offensive. Throughout, our doomsday experts are either feigning seriousness and dread over what the book of Revelations foretells by remarking unabashedly how distressing, terrible, etc. it will be, or reminding us that, regardless of how ridiculous the prophecies (horses with lions’ heads and snakes’ tales, stars made of wormwood falling to the planet and one third of vaguely everything being destroyed) may sound, they must be true because they’re all actually in the Bible — and cited. So it’s not really blasphemous, just caustically mocking.

Yet it never really gets distasteful, since the brunt of the joke is usually on the authors and readers themselves as Godless hedonists. While the “envy” of those reaching salvation is heavily nuanced with sarcasm, half the jokes are about all the Jews left behind — even the book itself, a parody finance book written by two Jewish authors, is a total joke.

A nice addition to coffee tables or the spot adjacent to “The Zombie Survival Guide” by Max Brooks on your bookshelf, “How to Profit from the Coming Rapture” offers some absurd financial schemes, comic relief and the realization that a world with a blackened sun, oceans of blood and horsemen riding around directing legions of beasts doesn’t have to be so depressing, financially or otherwise.

5 stars out of 5

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