La très catastrophique visite du zoo

Joël Dicker

Description

"June 28, 1919. The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles glittered like a chandelier in a slaughterhouse."

So begins the autopsy of a peace that was never meant to last. The Doomsday Timetable is not a simple countdown to war; it is a meticulously documented descent into the machinery of madness, from the beer-soaked politics of Munich to the climate-controlled BBC studio where a Prime Minister's trembling hands declared the failure of everything he believed in.

This is a history told through its details: the specific gravity of cold tea in a Downing Street cup, the bureaucratic efficiency of a "Pencil Readiness Coordinator, Grade II" in the Reich Chancellery, and the chilling satisfaction of an SS officer assessing the "propaganda value" of a staged atrocity. Witness the fragile European order dismantled form by form, as cynical diplomats perform ballets of protocol and well-meaning leaders discover that their faith in procedure is no defense against a predator who does not follow the rules.

Follow Neville Chamberlain, a man whose physical decline—the tremor in his hands, the pain in his stomach—keeps a more honest record than his own speeches. Watch as his certainty is machine-gunned by reality, and the umbrella that symbolized "peace for our time" becomes a relic of a world that no longer exists, an artifact requiring reclassification by the same civil service that processes declarations of war.

With a voice that fuses the tactical clarity of a staff meeting, the atmospheric dread of a ghost story, and the dark, savage wit of a eulogy at the wrong funeral, The Doomsday Timetable lays bare the chillingly logical progression of events that led a generation, still scarred by one global conflict, directly into the jaws of another.

This is the definitive account of how the world ends—not with a bang, but with a perfectly filed, triplicate form authorizing the bang to proceed on schedule.

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