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A review by jasonmehmel
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
4.0
A powerful idea with a book that makes it's case exhaustively to make it inarguable.
The basic premise is that fundamentally, most people will help other people in a disaster, instead of turning on each other. She takes you through major disasters through history, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, and it proves the point again and again. (And how in New Orleans, the apparent lawlessness was never as bad as it was pictured.)
Those times where things do actually go bad, it's usually because folks who are scared of losing power or privilege are responding out of fear and then creating a bad situation. (Gathering troops to protect businesses instead of helping rescue people from debris, for example. And when citizens are taking first aid supplies to help the wounded, they get shot.)
She makes the point that disasters create an opportunity for us to be better with each other, and that sometimes, that can persist past the disaster in question.
This book validated my overall optimism in human nature!
My only question, especially in some of the bigger disasters of today, such as COVID-19 and climate change... how can we capitalize on this same social good? The problem with these disasters is that there is too large a gap between the beginning of the problem and it's impact upon us, which makes it harder for us to come together against the problem the same way we would against a fire, an earthquake, or a flood...
The basic premise is that fundamentally, most people will help other people in a disaster, instead of turning on each other. She takes you through major disasters through history, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans, and it proves the point again and again. (And how in New Orleans, the apparent lawlessness was never as bad as it was pictured.)
Those times where things do actually go bad, it's usually because folks who are scared of losing power or privilege are responding out of fear and then creating a bad situation. (Gathering troops to protect businesses instead of helping rescue people from debris, for example. And when citizens are taking first aid supplies to help the wounded, they get shot.)
She makes the point that disasters create an opportunity for us to be better with each other, and that sometimes, that can persist past the disaster in question.
This book validated my overall optimism in human nature!
My only question, especially in some of the bigger disasters of today, such as COVID-19 and climate change... how can we capitalize on this same social good? The problem with these disasters is that there is too large a gap between the beginning of the problem and it's impact upon us, which makes it harder for us to come together against the problem the same way we would against a fire, an earthquake, or a flood...