A review by thebookbin
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley

informative medium-paced

2.0

 Is there a point in every girl's life when she is obsessed with disasters? I remember accidentally pulling an all-nighter watching tsunami videos only a few years ago. Maybe it was the fact that when I was in kindergarten when 9/11 happened, that year and every year after our teachers, media, and government set out on retraumatizing us every year, forcing us to watch videos of it, watch documentaries of the people who jumped to their deaths, forced us to revere the men who went to war to traumatize a whole new generation of children. And I've lived through a few disasters of my own. I survived Harvey in 2017. I survived getting caught in a tornado. Who wouldn't be curious? It's that curiosity that drove me to pick up The Unthinkable and in the end to be disappointed by its lackluster offering. 

Fundamentally, I think this book suffers as a product of its time. Published in 2008, and surely years in the making, this book cannot escape the perverse fascination of a post 9/11 world and all that it entails. Ripley spends an inordinate amount of time on the World Trade Center, survivors, and Ground Zero stories. Despite claiming to be interested in the average person, Ripley almost solely focuses on soldiers, policemen, and special forces stories and studies, and only scales her research to a white western audience, which she tacitly acknowledges.

Despite feeling a certain kinship with Ripley over our interest in disasters and how people respond to them, I found myself almost disgusted with how uncurious she seems to be about the most interesting questions she poses (and then abruptly brushes aside). At her core, Ripley is a bioessentialist and a skeptic. She believes in a rigid and inflexible binary that colors everything. You are the sum of the labels foisted upon you. Altruism is nothing except an evolutionary biproduct of breeding rituals: looking like a hero makes you appeal to the women around you—a woman being a hero? We don't do that here—and if you die being heroic then the women in your family will get more attention and therefore breed and make more babies ensuring your genetic material lives on. 

Ripley briefly acknowledges that men are more likely to be labeled as "heroes" as a by product of them having more dangerous jobs in general, or being more prone to engage in risky behavior but is so dispassionate about exploring the reasons why. Combined with her hero-worship of the people who do the most harm in this world: soldiers, police, and special forces, it seems like Ripley is trying her best to appease a male audience who won't take her seriously unless she engages in the imperialist circle-jerk of the military industrial complex. 

Ripley is also incapable of removing herself from the narrative, even though she claims to be a journalist. She dedicates an entire chapter to, bizarrely enough, the size of her amygdala. Instead of acknowledging her own humanity as a subjective and connective force of her storytelling, Ripley feels the need to insert herself into the narrative alongside the survivors she interviews, despite not being a survivor herself (or acknowledging herself as one). She's like a child at a birthday party, incessantly reminding everyone else it's her birthday next week. We can indulge you once or twice, but after that "Honey, it's not your turn. Let someone else have a go."

This is an ambitious work that falls short of its goal. Despite its claims it did not introduce me to my "disaster personality" nor did it pose any questions that I had not already asked myself as a person with an interest in disaster, who has survived one or two of her own. I can't quite tell if this work suffers as a product of its time, or if Ripley was simply a poor messenger for its delivery

★★ sad, uncurious stars