3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Publish Or Perish, Cut And Paste, February 9, 2010
This review is from: Introduction to Emergency Management, Second Edition (Butterworth-Heinemann Homeland Security) (Hardcover)
"Introduction to Emergency Management" (Second Edition) is an informative book which provides an adequate introduction to emergency management at an undergraduate level, but contains some systematic structural flaws that detract from its stature in the field. The book was written by two former FEMA officials, George Haddow and Jane Bullock. They occupied key positions at FEMA during the Clinton administration, and obviously respect their former boss, FEMA Director James Lee Witt. For the record, Witt was one of Clinton's numerous Arkansan appointees, and was certainly one of the best. Witt dramatically elevated FEMA's stature within the government and embraced an all-hazards approach to emergency preparedness and response. I applaud Witt's efforts and service.
I would have expected two of Witt's disciples to have written an excellent book, and in some areas the book really delivers. Unfortunately, in others the authors use their position for seemingly self-serving feuds with the policies of other administrations, and are particularly critical of the George W. Bush administration for the obvious shift to focusing on terrorism after the events of September 11, 2001. While I actually do agree that FEMA needs to retain an all-hazards perspective, the terrorism threat is downplayed (it gets one chapter) in this book, and their views on the future terrorist threat are obviously viewed through rose-colored glasses. Their biggest issues with the Bush administration seem to be the loss of prestige of putting FEMA under DHS, and the scuttling of "Project Impact", a FEMA program that was discontinued for being a lower budgetary priority than other things (like terrorism) that the Bush administration had on their plate. Both authors were heavily associated with "Project Impact".
The book was written pre-Hurricane Katrina, and that's unfortunate (presumably the third edition addresses that issue). An ironic passage is found on p. 62: "For a city like New Orleans, however, which is built below sea level and where relocation is impractical, levees can be used effectively to protect flood-prone areas." Or not. The New Orleans levees were not well designed or maintained, but the authors gloss over the fact that disasters are very likely to happen when a city is built adjacent to the water below sea level in an area frequented by hurricanes. Certainly there were more problems with the Katrina disaster than FEMA alone can be blamed for, but the politically easy policy that has encouraged reconstruction in the same place is one that is utterly bound to fail, regardless of the levee system installed, or regardless of FEMA funding for flood mitigation. The next chapter concludes in typically obtuse style: "Most consider President Bush's election loss to be partly attributable to the federal government's inability to manage domestic disasters". What? President Bush actually won the election (twice), and even if he had lost, I would need to see concrete evidence to convince me that the loss was in any meaningful way attributable to domestic emergency response. FEMA budgets and priorities do not historically play crucial roles in Presidential elections.
The book has several flaws: careful readers will note the foreshadowing of one of the larger ones if they read the Acknowledgements (p. xv) and discover that a long list of graduate students are thanked for "their hard work in conducting the preliminary research and draft for this book". Yes, it's a not uncommon problem: teachers (both authors are Adjunct Professors at The George Washington University) want to publish ("publish or perish"), but don't want to or have the time to do their own original research or writing, so they have their students do it. (I have seen this at another university firsthand.) The students may be assigned the work, compelled to do it, do it as part of a thesis or project, or do it for some other reason, but the fact is that George Haddow and Jane Bullock have their names on the cover, and if their acknowledgements are accurate, their students did a large part of the work writing this book.
I certainly don't know who wrote what, but I can definitively say that the quality of the prose varies dramatically throughout the book, making me wonder how many authors the book effectively has. This is one of the primary reasons I gave the book a two star rating, though it's far from the only one. An even bigger reason is that enormous swaths of the book are essentially cut and pasted from government publications or web sites. Page after page is taken from government sources, which, unlike privately authored material, can be cited in bulk with no problems, copyright or otherwise. Some of the material was not even updated by the authors, when a quick perusal would have shown it needed to be. On p. 110, for example, in the middle of a lengthy passage credited to FEMA, the book (which was written in 2005, copyrighted in 2006) states "FEMA expects the [Capability Assessment for Readiness] report to be completed and distributed to the President and the U.S. Congress in the first quarter of 2001". That's just sloppy, and it's patently unacceptable. Unfortunately it's also not the sole issue: extremely obscure acronyms are used repeatedly without defining them, another subtle sign that the book was written by multiple people and they were not properly coordinated.
The best thing in the book (pp. 319-325), is a case study written by Roz Lasker (The New York Academy of Medicine, September 2004) about readiness in terrorism scenarios, and specifically dealing with how people actually behave in emergencies versus how officials expect them to behave in those emergencies. It was extremely insightful, and I applaud the authors for including it in the book. The authors also compiled a very nice set of appendices, although Appendix D was taken wholesale from a government Internet site and Appendix E, which is a self-justifying fluff piece about Homeland Security, was taken from the "Department of Security Results Agenda-August 2004".
This book does contain some good information. The basics of dealing with different hazards and mitigation strategies are well explained. Unfortunately the terrorism threat is downplayed despite the disproportionately large death (and monetary) toll of September 11, 2001 compared with the other disasters in the book (even in combination), and the book clearly contains bias (especially in the final chapter) in favor of their former employer, and against other administrations which had to deal with much different problems than they confronted. Finally, the quality of writing is not what you would expect from two distinguished civil servants; for these reasons in combination with the enormous percentage of the book that is simply a restating of information commonly available on government Internet sites and in easily obtainable publications, I cannot recommend this book.
The shell of the book is strong; I hope that the third edition addressees the weaknesses of this edition and is markedly improved.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
