A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

The cataclysmic events make for gripping, if grim, reading. The result is almost always captivating and compelling, not least because she is unusually gifted at mixing dispassionate narration with fervent, first-person experience. In taut case studies of North American disasters that reach from Nova Scotia to Mexico City and from 1906 to 9/11, she blends reportage with research and folds in a kind of theological musing with political enthusiasm.

Solnit is neither naive nor blind to the misery out of which she finds faith forged. How to tease out, much less emphasize, threads of hope or community from the shattered spaces and lives of calamity? How can supposedly redemptive, even joyful, qualities emerging amid horror be explored so as to not render the interpreter naive, callous or both? In contrast to the presuppositions of the powerful (and Hollywood), steadfast about the inevitability of anarchic mayhem and riot, Solnit makes a convincing case for the sheer dignity and decency of people coming together amid terror. 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. OL15273775W Page_number_confidence 93.62 Pages 378 Ppi 300 Republisher_date 20200204191402 Republisher_operator Republisher_time 434 Scandate 20200203174823 Scanner 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. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 14:02:19 Boxid IA1771217 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Col_number COL-609 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit