It seems like everyone has their own vision of the Apocalypse. For Christians, The End is synonymous with the Four Horsemen, the Rapture and the Anti-Christ. Environmentalists, meanwhile, fear climate change, melting polar ice caps and turbulent weather. For paranoid newshounds, if rogue states like Iran or North Korea don't trigger a nuclear war, then debt-wracked banks will soon lead to total societal collapse. Then there's Hollywood: aliens, meteors, earthquakes, malfunctioning uteri and Hitchcock's angry birds. While the Apocalypse-theme has essentially become a pop culture cliché, it remains endlessly fascinating. Case in point: the Christian-focused "Left Behind" books, which have...