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A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sometimes, a book comes along that forces me to stop reading every few pages. Not because it's badly written, clumsily argued or otherwise defective. But simply because it's so provocative, so compelling and so articulate that I had to pause in order to digest a whole raft of new ideas, toss out some old preconceptions and ponder some important questions.

Solnit's core argument -- that we can find hints of a humanist-style utopia in the world's worst disasters -- is not only provocative but fascinating, as she amasses a host of evidence to prove her point from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 up to Hurricane Katrina nearly a century later, disasters that range from the Halifax explosion during World War 1 to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 in both New York and Washington. In the midst of these disasters, as she chronicles repeatedly, people -- ordinary individuals, not institutions -- rose to the occasion. Rather than panicking, they acted, whether that meant battling to save lives or simply to reach out to strangers in random acts of love and compassion. With disaster, paradoxically, can come joy, since in disaster it is possible for those of us not immediately afflicted to rediscover a sense of community and purpose that is otherwise absent from our lives. "The desires and possibilities awakened are so powerful that they shine even from wreckage, carnage and ashes," Solnit writes.

Solnit was driven to write this book by her experiences in California's Loma Prieta earthquake; I was compelled to pick it up by my own experiences in the heart of lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001. I witnessed sights that continue to give me nightmares, but experienced (and to some extent participated in) the kind of reforging of a spirit of community of the kind that she describes. I had stranded strangers camped out in my apartment, and, after trekking across the Brooklyn Bridge to my home, benefitted from the help of others (like the woman standing with a roll of paper towels making makeshift nose filters to block out the smoke and stench wafting over us).

What this book does, however, goes well beyond simply chronicling the many and very compelling personal stories that form part the evidence supporting Solnit's case. The phenomenon of joyousness and purpose found amidst destruction naturally raises the question in her mind of why it takes a disaster to do this -- and why it is that the preconception is that we will all behave like headless chickens or -- worse -- as violent lunatics in response to a crisis. So she formulates her second theory, one that is more provocative still -- that of 'elite panic'. Those with a vested stake in the status quo, whether they are politicians, corporations or even established charitable organizations, have found that disasters can be dangerous for them. After all, earthquakes in Nicaragua and Mexico exposed and made unacceptable the immense shortcomings of both countries' political regimes (in the former case, the Somoza dictatorship, in the latter, single party rule by Mexico's PRI). When a disaster suddenly transforms a society that we inhabit, it opens our eyes and imaginations to new possibilities -- ones that are not always welcomed by those in whose interests the previous society worked. (No wonder George Bush told us all to just go shopping...) Elite panic, as she labels the reaction, manifests itself in a rupture of the social bonds, in this case, the bonds tying most of us to those in a position of authority. Her argument becomes more provocative still, as she argues that "the person in the elite position does something that creates greater danger", whether it is shooting people carrying bags in case they are really rioters and looters, concealing crucial information (Three Mile Island) or, in Mexico City, assisting owners of garment factories to rescue their expensive equipment while leaving seamstresses trapped in the rubble to die.

This isn't a perfect book. Solnit is at her best when she explores her primary thesis -- that of the disaster utopia -- and links it to psychological and philosophical thinking throughout history. The 'elite panic' argument is at once more provocative and less well developed, but perhaps that is inevitable; I see this book as the starting point in what could be an important debate revolving around the issue of what is the meaning of community and coexistence.

More provocative questions flow from this and are left only partly addressed. For instance, Solnit chronicles ways in which some of the changes that emerged from disaster utopias have led to lasting changes. But while she displays her passion for the grassroots and improvised solutions and tactics, most of those legacies have been institutional in nature, such as the formation of a union of seamstresses in Mexico. Left unaddressed is the question of whether those new institutions, despite their grassroots origins in disaster, can remain organic when the initial sense of urgency fades. As political history in Britain and elsewhere has shown us, unions, too, can become part of the political elite. Similarly, Solnit appears to argue in favor of finding ways to craft similar grassroots solutions to all problems on an ongoing basis. It's easy to toss that out as a utopian ideal, but when the sense of external threat passes, so too does the overwhelming urge to bond with your neighbor, previously a stranger. I was stunned by the unusual politeness and warmth that swept across New York in the aftermath of 9/11, but that didn't last long. (And just today, someone assumed I was sarcastic when I thanked them for holding a door open for me, and starting screaming at me... ah yes, the normal New York!) So the broader questions remain of how to handle conflict in more normalized times, when at least some people are not longer willing to relinquish their own self interest in the broader cause of social utopia. Similarly, like it or not we do live in a global world; I suspect there is a limit to the extent that we could manage that world by acting solely in ways that Solnit would embrace as part of her world view. (She emerges as a big fan of anarchists like Kropotkin; it was a pleasure to find an accurate representation of what anarchism is -- not chaos and random violence of the kind seen in fiction like A Clockwork Orange, but rather self-determination and egalitarianism.)

After spending several days thinking about this book once I'd finished reading it, I ended up thinking that it is far more valuable for what it does accomplish than would be reflected if I didn't give it a 4.5 star rating. Had Solnit remained as thoughtful and balanced in her view of the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina as in the other disasters she chronicles, and had she put forward in a more consistent matter thoughts about ways that people can retain a sense of community, purpose and joy when the disaster passes or how to create that spirit in the absence of a disaster, it would have been a perfect five-star book. (The latter elements are there, but in a scattered and sometimes unfocused way throughout, and then in a breathless and short conclusion.)

Highly recommended to anyone interested in current affairs, political philosophy, etc. The arguments will be particularly appealing to Green Party members and other advocates of alternative societal and political arrangements, and probably unappealing to libertarians. Still, Solnit's analysis is compelling and whether you end by embracing her world view wholeheartedly or dismissing it with scorn, I'd recommend reading this. It's great food for thought, and deserves a wide audience, of the kind that in the past has flocked to books like Fukuyama's treatise on the demise of history or Samuel Huntington's argument about the clash of civilizations. (Oh yes, unlike either of those two scholarly books, it's beautifully written!) If you've already read Susan Jacoby's societal critique,The Age of American Unreason (Vintage), this is a great follow-on book.

Before I picked up this book, I didn't even know that there was an academic field called "disaster sociology." It turns out it goes back to William James himself, an eyewitness to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake who had the open-mindedness to look at how the people of San Francisco were affected by that disaster without projecting his own prejudices on it. He was astonished; people in disasters don't act anything like how we would expect them to. James' findings have been replicated by studying people in hundreds of historical and modern disasters, and from those studies disaster sociologists have come to some concrete, reliable scientific findings. Solnit believes very, very much that the rest of us need to know what the disaster sociologists know, because our mistaken expectations of what will happen during and immediately after disasters keep making things worse, not better, for the survivors. Before James Lee Witt took over FEMA, and ever since he left, it's been a standing joke that all disasters come in two phases: the disaster itself, and then the even worse disaster when FEMA arrives. This is not a coincidence; Witt knows things about disaster that almost nobody else in America knows, including other first responders, and it showed up in his priorities.

Solnit draws most of her examples from four disasters and their aftermaths, each recounted in detail: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 explosion of an ammunition ship in Halifax harbor that destroyed the city, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 of 2001. Other earthquakes, hurricanes, bombings, and other disasters are cited for comparison and contrast. And here's what she reports, based on extensive research by multiple scientists into the actual first-hand accounts of people who lived through disasters:

During a disaster, heroism is not particularly rare. Before a disaster, most people predict that they will panic, will react selfishly, will be cowards. It turns out not to be true. Most people don't run away from a disaster, they run towards it to see if they can help. Most people don't trample others to get away, they stop to pick each other up and help each other along. We keep being surprised by the fact that in an actual disaster, we are nearly all better people than we are in our daily lives. Disasters bring out the best in almost all of us. This is the book's single most important finding. It is extensively documented, and that's important, because most people will find it to be the most surprising.

Disaster survivors do not panic. Actual examples of people succumbing to helplessness and going catatonic, or of rushing around destructively in panic, are seldom if ever found. When people self-evacuate, they almost 100% consistently do so calmly, in an orderly fashion, and spontaneously cooperate, even at their own risk, to carry out the wounded and the disabled. Crowds of people have trampled to death the injured and the fallen in the past -- but not in disasters. And once evacuated, rather than succumbing to grief and shock, the overwhelming majority of them move purposefully about, driven by the overwhelming urge to find something useful to do. More of them do find something useful to do, within the first half a day or so, than you would imagine. Those who find something useful to do, however briefly or however little it is, consistently report feeling overcome by joy, not panic or fear or depression or any other madness.

Disaster survivors generally do not rape, loot, murder, or rob. Crime rates go down during disasters, not up. There are almost no documented examples, anywhere in human history, of people taking advantage of a disaster as an opportunity to commit crimes. Two specific examples of things that are called looting have been reported. First, if people need things from inside a home or a store to survive the first several days of a disaster and there is no one there to sell it to them or share it with them, they do take those things; but actual eyewitness accounts of disasters reveal that they are more likely to overpay, to leave money on the counter to cover what they took, than they are to steal. And secondly, there are accounts of people going into buildings that were about to be destroyed by fire or flood to take valuables out. Does it really count as stealing if someone takes a case of expensive cigars from a cigar store that is about to burn to the ground, or takes a flat screen TV out of a building that's about to go under water? Technically, yes, but that's the only extent there is of any documented "looting" in disasters.

Rich people, politicians, and soldiers, on the other hand, consistently do panic, loot, and murder, specifically out of fear that poor people will. This happens so consistently that disaster sociologists have a term for it, "elite panic." Because they fear that temporarily ungoverned people will rape, murder, loot, and rob they send in soldiers under orders to shoot to kill, and shoot to kill they do. Having been instructed to think of the survivors of the disaster as little better than animals, many soldiers abuse the survivors on little or no provocation. In particular, the US Army's reaction to disasters, foreign and domestic, turns out to be execrable, by contrast to the US Coast Guard, the only military unit reported on in the whole book that never succumbs to elite panic, no matter how much political pressure they are put under to do so. Why not? Because disasters are a big part of what the Coast Guard does for a living, which means that the Coast Guard's experienced officers are just about the only "elites" we have who have enough first-hand experience with disaster survivors to know, first hand, what the disaster sociologists had to find out through scientific research.

Even when they don't panic, "leaders" are mostly useless in a crisis. Each disaster is unique. In the first several days after a disaster, society's leaders, governors, rulers, and experts don't know who lived and who died. Among the living, they have no idea who has what skills that can be used. They don't know what resources are still available inside the disaster zone and they don't know which resources inside the zone were destroyed. They don't know what infrastructure still works and what infrastructure has failed. From roughly the 2nd hour of the disaster until at least the third day, maybe later, the only people who know these things are the disaster survivors themselves, and that's why during those first three days, ad hoc gatherings of random survivors do a better job of organizing relief kitchens, digging sanitary latrines, distributing any supplies that are available, and improvising temporary shelter than any top-down disaster response community can be.

If elite panic focuses on a single ethnic group, the result can be particularly disastrous slaughter. It doesn't have to be. San Franciscans stood up for the ethnic Chinese in 1906, and there was no slaughter. But Ray Nagin, in particular, gets singled out for the most personalized and individual hatred by Solnit; his palapable and vocal fear that his fellow black New Orleaners would descend into savagery, and his constant acceptance of and passing along of every rumor to that effect that he heard, resulted in the mobilization of multiple white racist militias who killed harmless black people who were just trying to evacuate or survive, who posed no threat to anyone, and so far the killers have gone unpunished; a similar disaster befell the Korean-ancestry residents of one Japanese city after their earthquake, when that city's local mayor, like Nagin, whipped up fear of and hatred towards them.

For many of society's outcasts and downtrodden, the disaster is not the worst day of their lives, it's the best. For the first 72 hours or so of a disaster, you don't have to worry about losing your job. You don't have to worry about whether or not you have any money. You don't have to worry about what you're going to do with the rest of your life. And a lot of people who've lived on the fringes of society, whether fringe religious groups or outcast Vietnam veterans or the homeless, are people who've accumulated the hard way an awful lot of the skills needed to cope with the sudden loss of everything. For example, after 9/11 one of the most important and popular places for mourners to gather was organized by a handful of rave promoters, assisted by a nearby Buddhist temple, and managed by a dozen or so local homeless guys who used to live in nearby alleys; in hurricane stricken southern Mississippi, one of the most important relief kitchens and disaster response centers was co-organized by a group of Christian missionaries and a group of Rainbow Family volunteers who happened to get there at about the same time. What all of those people felt was tremendous gratitude that someone finally needed the skills they happened to have.

Those are just the findings that jumped out at me the hardest, after a single reading, and Solnit is absolutely right that everybody in the world needs to hear these things, needs to know these things, needs to respond to disaster based on how people actually act, not how we're afraid they're going to act. This is a very, very important book ...

... even though, frankly, it keeps getting tiresome. It took me a long time to read this book, because of one tooth-grindingly awful flaw, and that's Solnit's personal politics. Solnit chooses to read these findings, about how people react in the first 72 hours after a city-wide disaster, as "proof" of her anarcho-communist politics, proof that what we ought to be doing is finding some way to eliminate government, eliminate money, eliminate private property, so we can all self-organize our daily ordinary lives with the joy, purpose, and improvisational brilliance that disaster survivors consistently show. I remain unconvinced, and probably so will you, which makes it increasingly wearying when, every 3 or 4 chapters, she stops talking about disasters and starts talking about some future utopia or about how we should be living our daily lives according to her. My advice is to do what I did, do what you do when anybody with an equally weak grasp on reality starts ranting about politics: smile and nod, and move along. Skim the political rants about the wonders of anarcho-communism until you get back to the meat of the book, the actual useful disaster sociology. It is absolutely worth reading past the dreary fantasy-based leftist anarchism to get all this juicy science-based sociology and psychology in one very readable place. If you aren't already susceptible to anarcho-communist utopian arguments, they're not going to infect you against your will like some disease, but the rest of the book will infect you with something you do need: the realization that in any disaster, with the exception of a handful of us who have clawed their way to the top, the rest of us are all, pretty nearly without exception, better, kinder, and more useful people than we would ever have imagined in advance.

The following is less of a stand-alone review and more of an engagement with other reviewers as well as with Solnit regarding the political content of the book.

A number of reviewers of this book throw around the term "utopian" as a self-evident critique and to brand Solnit's political position as naïve or unrealistic. However, as I will discuss below, this is a rather thoughtless cheap shot that masks more than it reveals. The term "utopian" is being used here like the word "terrorist:" they are both terms that reveal more about the positional bias of the speaker than about the content of the thought or actions referred to.

The political problem of how to decentralize jurisdictional power so that people have more control over their own affairs (as anarchists would have it) while protecting those same people against the predatory actions of more centralized entities (like corporations or nation-states with armies) is fundamental and not answered to my satisfaction by Solnit. But this problem does not mean that the anarchist impulse toward decentralization or away from hierarchical forms is marginal or unrealistic. In fact, the state of California is currently poised to devolve a major swath of jurisdiction to local municipalities and Spain has done this over time at the national level since the return of democracy in 1976. (Just 18% of public spending in Spain now goes through the national government.)

As to the "pie-in-the-sky" overly imaginative imputation to utopianism, it must be pointed out that all human organizational entities are party enacted and partly imagined (and any sociologist since Durkheim should be aware of this). The nation-state with its sacred symbols and rituals such as flags, anthems, pledges of allegiance, holy constitutional documents, etc, is nothing if not utopian in that it is founded on an imaginary community (our actual transactions and communications are with a tiny fraction of the population) and imaginary goals that will never be fully achieved ("justice" "fraternity" "happiness" etc). Dominant ideologies such as economic neoliberalism are highly utopian: their supporters claim that free trade and deregulation of businesses will somehow trickle down to benefit all of us but decades of such policies have resulted in the greatest disparity of wealth since the Great Depression. The Obama administration's extension of Bush tax cuts for the very, very wealthy was naïve, unrealistic and had no basis in verifiable evidence but I did not hear anyone call it utopian. Democracy itself is extremely utopian and moreover, perhaps more of a delusion than we would like to think as political scientist Jodi Dean has recently argued.

I suggest greater care to these writers. One of the central aspects of Modernity is the sense that the world is open to human intervention and can be changed. This is also the premise of utopia, with the added quality that the world can be changed for the better. If you mean to say that you disagree with Solnit (or anyone's) proposal for how to improve society, say so and explain why. If you mean to say that Solnit's ideas have less popular support than Neoliberal utopianism and therefore have a serious challenge ahead of them, you'd be right, but also stating the obvious. Why not ask why people assume the inevitability and preferability of a central state? Does it really provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people as promised? How do you reconcile the state's mission to guarantee equality and the (as per John Locke) central function of the state (particularly the legal apparatuses of courts, congressional lawmaking, armed police, and mass incarceration) to defend existing property relations that are highly and devastatingly unequal? If you want to argue that anarchy is bad, you have to demonstrate why hierarchy or centralization is good and you'd have a lot of contradictory evidence to account for.

As for reviewers who wrote that the book would be better without Solnit discussing the political implications, I completely disagree. Had the book remained purely descriptive, it would have been much less interesting or generative of debate. I reject the implication that being "apolitical" is even possible since to be silent is to accept and endorse the political status quo. I'm not convinced by everything Solnit argues but I wish more writers had the courage to present "naïve," "utopian" proposals to improve society because the status quo is the real disaster.

I won't rehash all significant points that the other two reviews provide, since these are quite adequate for a basic understanding of Solnit's thesis.

This book is good. The thesis is quite original, and you are thoroughly convinced by the end of the book that disasters and catastrophes are two different things. She brings different sources to bear in making her point, ranging from newspaper articles to eyewitness accounts to interviews she did herself. I found a lot of the information fascinating, and I am glad I read this book (the publisher seems to have forgotten how end notes work, however).

That said, I hesitate to give it 5 stars because of the style. Just as the title of my review states, this book would have greatly benefited from some close editing. Some of the prose is repetitive, and sometimes it strays from the point. For instance, her account of the earthquake in Mexico City bridges at least two chapters, with a large segment in the middle talking about Carnival and Santos. Interesting stuff, but was this needed? Probably not. Sticking to the disasters and the case studies would have made this book 5 stars. I wanted to give the book more credit, but at times it felt disorganized, as if it was a compilation of a series of medium length articles.

All things considered, however, I would recommend this book. Pick it up if you are at all interested in disaster studies.

I found this book deeply moving and illuminating. It beautifully shows how most people respond to disasters with the very best of human qualities: altruism, solidarity, care for others, community, and heroism. It makes abundantly clear that the usual assumption made by government and mass media about social behavior in disasters - that people revert to a state of violent competition, panic and conflict - is a myth. This should lead us to entirely rethink how we prepare for future disasters. Not only that, it should open our eyes to the latent possibilities and desires, in our atomized and hyper-individualistic society, for the deeper meaning and sense of belonging that come with human connection, mutual support and community.

I really wanted to like this book (_The Nation_'s top book of 2009), and at first I thought I would due to the prose-y writing style. Flowery language for a non-fiction book could have been nice, but instead I came to resent it as overly precious since the "facts" in the book were so subjective and the data sources so questionable.

The book says the same thing over and over again, and the back-up for her statements involves a handful of first-person narratives from over 100 years ago at best, quotes from friends and personal stories at worst. The connections that she establishes between disparate disasters reek of effort, drawing unreliable conclusions from comparing unequal events and glossing over challenging evidence. Her point could have been made concisely in a 3-panel brochure (entitled "People Respond Positively in Disasters"), with the added benefit of saving the reader the trouble of going over the same arguments for 300 pages. Look; *I* just saved you the trouble.

In many ways this feels like a fluff Katie Couric news story--like it could have been called _The Perky Side of Hellish Nightmares_. The author interjects herself into the chapters a lot, which is unnecessary as even without the poetic "I" statements one can't help but feel that her bourgeois background colors her perspective entirely. This is why I came to resent the language used; it self-indulgently covered up for a noticeable lack of substance.

Finishing this book was painful. I get the author's point and don't even necessarily disagree with her; boy, do I feel like she wasted my time, though.

This is a very interesting book with an entirely new thesis of how posttrauma crowds respond. It reflects more of my experpience of individuals' and groups' behavior after an unexpected trauma. I wish the author would be on the talk shows to challenge the common belief that people are irresponsible and criminal in their reactions to terrible events. The authorities regularly create more problems than they solve.

This book is one of Rebecca Solnit's forays into sociology. She's a good writer, but not a serious professional sociologist. If I try to classify the book into one of the subdisciplines of sociology, it most nearly falls into the category of conflict theory. With various examples, Solnit sets forth a vision of humanity that's more or less Utopian in its description of the behavior of ordinary people, and asserts that humanity doesn't usually behave in this Utopian fashion because of constraints and mythology imposed by an elite. Well, maybe. The book has certainly led me to stop and think about my own assumptions, which is perhaps all that one can hope for from a book.

However, along with a number of well-chosen vignettes, Solnit injects a lot of excess baggage derived from her political views and her cultural outlook. This is unfortunate; the result reminds me of an extended essay by a passionate teenager who believes that the world's problems would be solved if only... Given that Solnit is an adult in her late 40s, I wish she had omitted the polemics from this book and saved the polemics for her frequent columns, where they would fit nicely as opinion pieces. If she had done that, I would take the book far more seriously than I do.

Is it `human nature' to panic in disaster or to listen to the better angels of our nature? (Notwithstanding the idea that we might be able to identify and define an immutable form of `human nature'.) This debate has gone on for a while, and Solnit traps the issue as a dichotomy between two completing philosophical positions.

The first position is the idea of a Hobbesian world where we must prepare for, and fight in the "WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL". As a refuge from those wars, let me tell you, all usually triumphs over all.

The second position is that of a utopian anarchist position that in disaster we recognize the common humanity of the all and we gather force and strength from togetherness - this being a microcosm of how we would order ourselves absent a structuring and repressive authority. The second position is the one which Solnit takes.

While I am more sympathetic to the author's philosophy, I am not sure she made her point rhetorically. I am no expert in the field of disasters or disaster communities so much of the information she presented was either wholly new or familiar information shown in a new light. For example, if I had been previously aware of the Halifax disaster, it only sat at the edges of my consciousness. These examples, while compelling as individual bits of pathos (I will admit to having tears in my eyes at places, she does melodrama well), aren't fit together right.

The only reason I was aware of this title was the laurels it received, most notably the Nation Book of the Year for 2009. However, there is just something about the author's organization that calls out for a skilled editor. The four examples she uses to back up here thesis are interspersed with theoretical talk that hits on just the right terms and applied just so that seem to indicate a novice learner of the subject. I think I am wrong, but this is what the prose feels like - highs and lows, theory and example, jigsaw puzzle pieces jammed together to make a fit but not a true one. I have to admit, I read the first hundred pages and walked away for far too long; I had anticipated reading this book so for me the deviances from quality are heightened due to my high expectations going in.

The other big issue is the limited scope of the examples against the thesis she is trying to prove. Her four examples are from a 99-year period on one continent and mostly focused on the United States. Not that the specific cannot illustrate the general, but she wants the specific to be the general. Her book is writing against the idea that people cannot control themselves and a philosophical tradition about the necessity of control but she never wants to expand against her thesis or trouble it at all. Are there actual counterexamples in the world? Is there a contemporary dialogue of Hobbesian thinkers in power? I don't know nor would I because Solnit doesn't cover such issues. The sad fact is that this project comes from a place of great potential yet in material fact is a disappointment; a mouse that can't roar.

The author's political beliefs--utopian anarchism--permeate this book. Disaster stories are used merely to support those beliefs and her politics blind her to other (credible) interpretations, contrary information and contradictions in her account. The best summary of the _goal_ of the book comes from the blurb on the inside cover: "Solnit's book points to a new vision of what society could become--one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local."

The stories from the disasters are anecdotes about _individuals_, or very small groups of individuals--the "communities" in the title are nowhere to be seen--the author appears to view them as nothing more than the simple sum of the individuals and their actions (I attribute this to her politics).

The accounts of altruist behavior in this book are what you routinely find in standard reporting of disasters (TV, newspapers, magazines, books). They are recitations of inspirational examples such at you might hear in a church sermon or state-of-the-union address. There is no analysis or other value-added to justify reading this book for those accounts. If you were unaware of such stories, they may save this book for you, but they are not a reason to _select_ this book.

I find her account of "elite panic" completely unconvincing (it is adopted from Caron Chess and Lee Clarke, whom I have not read). "Panic" is defined as an overwhelming fear that produces hysterical or irrational behavior. First, the attribution of fear to the elites seems to come entirely from her political viewpoint--that the elites are aware that a disaster provides an opportunity for them to be overthrown. However, her examples are to the contrary: Her descriptions of the Mexico City and Nicaragua disasters have elites that were arrogant and indifferent--their obliviousness to the risk led to the change occurring.

Second, she fails to report anything resembling panicky behavior. Although there are plenty of actions that can be judged irrational when compared to reality, the proper measure is based upon what the elites knew and believed, and she presents no evidence in this regard. Bad decisions based on bad information, stupidity, incompetence, questionable priorities, and exploitation are not "panic." In the Katrina disaster, the people she seems to regard as having panicked are some ordinary citizens she met in bars--hardly what I would term an "elite".

I was a "victim" in a Katrina-level disaster (Agnes, 1972) and am currently a leader in a neighborhood-based citizens' group trying to get our city (Palo Alto, on the San Francisco peninsula) to prepare to make better use of residents during a disaster (and encountering the nonsense and bureaucracy-gone-wild that the book gives examples of). In my 2009-04-25 review of Survival: How a Culture of Preparedness ... (http://www.amazon.com/review/R1ZX2SRE5JIVFS/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm), I pointed out that the perspective of the residents was missing from that account of Katrina, and recounted an episode where I felt endangered by the National Guard (at the very end of that review). So I was very receptive to the points about the communities that arise and the failures of the authorities. From the title and description, you might even think I was precisely the type of person the book was written for.

Instead, there are two chapters of the book that a reader such as me might find interesting. First, "General Funston's Fear" (pp 34-48) presents an account of destructive and counterproductive behavior by the authorities (1906 San Francisco earthquake/fire). The killing of people mistaken for looters is especially poignant. The book's accounts of other disasters provide too little in this area (yes, including Katrina). Second, "Hobbes in Hollywood, or the Few Versus the Many" (pp 120-132) is what I thought the book would be: competently written, cogent arguments, and reasonable awareness of organizational psychology. In both chapters, the author's politics is decidedly present, but at tolerable levels. I marked only four other passages (paragraph or less) as worthy of note. Pages 310-311 have several on-target observations (that Police and Fire are not "First Responders", your fellow citizens are).

However, the remainder of the book reads like a bad undergraduate thesis. There are substantial sections on utopianism and anarchism that come across more as a demonstration of what the author had read rather than as information for the reader. There are extensive digressions based upon the author's politics (and some other interests) that are at best tangentially related to the purported topic. Much of the writing is technically mediocre.

Worse, there is a wholesale lack of background knowledge and critical thinking and this undercuts the credibility of the book. For example, she constantly harps on the "joy" people report during the aftermath of a disaster and attributes it to the utopian circumstances. A more likely explanation is an adrenalin high (soldiers commonly say that they never felt as alive as when they were in combat).

Example: She reports selfish and violent behavior (after Katrina) but fails to see it as the flip side of altruistic behavior--it would undercut her political beliefs and thesis. Furthermore, she criticizes the authorities for failing to respond, but doesn't see the contradiction with her theme throughout the rest of the book deriding the authorities as unnecessary if not destructive.

Example: Since the 1950s, experts have repeatedly and convincingly shown that panic in highly unlikely during a disaster. One of the legitimate major topics of this book is that, despite this, elites have a continuing and unshakable belief that panic is a major threat. In my own involvement in disaster preparedness, I have heard this innumerable times from top officials and been unable to prevail with fact-based arguments. This is a serious problem because, by causing misallocations of resources, it seriously reduces the effectiveness of the response. Unfortunately, the author's politics produce an unconvincing explanation (the elites' fear of being overthrown). Instead, consider that many religious denominations and conservative politics preach that only fear of God and the authorities keep "base instincts" in check. Plus there are the media accounts of panic (chapter "Hobbes in Hollywood..."). Plus there are real life instances that could be mistaken for panic, such as food deliveries to refugee camps being mobbed. Having a mistaken understanding of the cause of the beliefs diminishes your chance of changing/countering them.

Example: Studies of disasters have repeatedly shown that _under-reaction_ to the threat is the biggest problem, and that this tendency is typically overcome by exercises of leadership, sometimes from members of an "elite" and sometimes from unexpected sources. This whole topic is missing from this book (contrary to author's politics?).

Example: In discussing looting, she claims that it rarely occurs, and that much of what is mistaken called "looting" are people justifiably getting survival supplies. She then proceeds to undercut her claim by excusing people taking other things, such as TVs, as salvaging items that would be destroyed anyway and as something the poor are due.

If this book had been oriented to its title rather than the author's politics, it could have been something that I would have highly recommended to the people I work with.

Add-on (2009-11-13): On Katrina, the author is dismissive of some of the reports of violence--probably from dependence on the mainstream media and/or her politics. I just attended a presentation from a member of the local medical response team (from near the author's hometown of San Francisco) that was at the Superdome site. They took fire as they arrived at the Superdome - not sounds of gunshots, but bullets "peppered" their trucks. At a subsequent site, they had to position their trucks to shield their hospital tents because they were taking occasional fire from a nearby neighborhood. (I had heard of such earlier, but didn't fully trust my sources). This aspect is a critical component of disaster sociology, but is not even mentioned in this book.

Additional tidbit: the official claims of few deaths "at the Superdome" was an artifice: People were dying in the medical facility which had been set up in the basketball arena that was just across a breezeway (and hence technically not the Superdome).