![]() Still, this vividly written, cogently argued book makes a compelling-and timely-case for the ability of ordinary people to collectively surmount the direst of challenges. Solnit falters when she generalizes her populist brief into an anarchist critique of everyday society that lapses into fuzzy what-ifs and uplifting volunteer testimonials. ![]() Indeed, the main problem in such emergencies, she contends, is the “elite panic” of officials who clamp down with National Guardsmen and stifling regulations. Here she investigates the startlingly egalitarian community responses to a range of natural and manmade. ![]() But she is typically lauded for clear-eyed, incisive analysis, not soft-focus uplift. Not that Solnit, an award-winning cultural critic, is a pessimist. Surveying disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, she shows that the typical response to calamity is spontaneous altruism, self-organization and mutual aid, with neighbors and strangers calmly rescuing, feeding and housing each other. THE TITLE OF Rebecca Solnit’s new book sounds uncharacteristically inspirational. ) reproves civil defense planners, media alarmists and Hollywood directors who insist that disasters produce terrified mobs prone to looting, murder and cannibalism unless controlled by armed force and government expertise. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasters and Infinite City: A San. ![]() Natural and man-made disasters can be “utopias” that showcase human solidarity and point the way to a freer society, according this stimulating contrarian study. ![]()
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