This is one of the best short story collections I have read. All of them deal with some sort of a post apocalyptic earth situation and all are done very well. My personal favorite was about a doctor who helped the local population survive, only he was not really a doctor. He had raided the local pharmacy after the nuclear war and read all the instruction labels on the packages and used this knowledge to cure people. However, he was not bound by the Hippocratic oath and refused to aid a man with diabetes, preferring to let his DNA drop out of the gene pool. Every one of these 7 or 8 stories is thought provoking and scary, in that 'if some huge catastrophe hit the earth, that would suck and how would I make it through' sort of way. ( )