A careful student of the sociology of catastrophe, Solnit argues that the human experience of disaster so alters convention that a different social milieu can emerge, if briefly, within them one distinguished by altruism and the absence of social hierarchies. In “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster,” this writer of impressive versatility explores disasters and the goodness that can come to characterize them. Yet Rebecca Solnit sees human possibilities inherent in the certainty of big trouble. Whatever their cause, disasters will be born of some mixture of human and natural action or inaction, lives will be irrevocably altered, and absurd numbers of people will die. The bad news is that more disasters are coming, arising from any number of sources: climate change, widespread infrastructural vulnerabilities, toxic threats brewed at cellular or weapons-grade levels, seismic or oceanic volatility, and so on and so on.
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May 2023
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