Customer Reviews

Introduction to Emergency Management, Second Edition (Butterworth-Heinemann Homeland Security)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Introduction to Emergency Management" is a straight-forward and insightful entre into the world of public emergency management. George Haddow and Jane Bullock are former senior FEMA officials that exerienced it first hand. And it shows.

I've added this book as one of my reference texts for the Organizational Continuity sessions I conduct. I also plan to use it in an workshop series I'm developing. It would be a great textbook for any course on Emergency Management AND it's also a good read for anyone interested in getting a taste of Emergency Management. I truly wish this book was in print when I took Emergency Management in grad school.

Highly recommended !!!

"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.

I found this to be a good introduction to emergency management. I am using it in my course on Disaster Preparidness: medical consequency management. Well written and easy to read for the novice.

This book is more useful for someone in government. If you need emergency planning/mangement for a business or industry, the book is a good starter but will be limited. Too bad it was published right before Katrina.

An excellent introductory book with a good review of the basic components of emergency management

This is a decent introduction to the field of emergency management as of about 2005. This volume is pitched at a level for newcomers to the subject. One problem: Its positive evaluation of the current American system looks silly when one adds Hurricane Katrina (the book was published before the hurricane struck). Obviously, the system was not in the state described in this volume.

Nonetheless, this is a nice work. It begins with a general introduction, including a history of emergency management in the US. The second chapter makes a critical point--the importance of an all hazards approach. Emergency management is not just about responding to terrorists--it is also about response to national disasters. The chapter does a fine job at emphasizing this.

Then, subsequent chapters consider the key issues of mitigation, response, recovery, and preparedness. We can try to reduce the odds of disasters and their consequences--but we must also plan on how to respond if such events actually occur. There follow chapters on communication, international disaster management, responding to the new terrorist threat, and the future of emergency management.

This book is quite useful for those who want an introductory analysis to the subject. As such, it performs pretty well, despite its overly optimistic view of the state of the system, at the time the book was published (recall the miserable performance of FEMA with Hurricane Katrina).

For a easy flowing read, buy this book. It has plenty of pertinent information mainly from a federal emergency standpoint.

The book does a fair job of giving an overview of emergency management. The veiw of FEMA is obviously written by persons wearing rose colored glasses. The glossing over of errors by FEMA and other emergency management agencies does not allow the reader to understand the evolution of emergency management. The book should be factual and less fluff.

I havent recieved the book yet... it shoulda for sure been in by Sep. 20th and its still not here. If i would have known that it took this long and i was lied to i would have never bought the book..

I ordered a text book and got excellent service from Amazon. It got here in a timely fashion and in excellent condition.