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

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.

Highly recommended if you are not intimately familiar with the disasters covered in this book. I learned a lot about the 1906 earthquake/fires in San Francisco, massive 1917 explosion in Halifax, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. Worth reading for those history lessons alone. Beyond that I definitely see why this book was recommended to me. Exploring the narrative around disasters vs the truth is a fascinating topic. That is true even if you don't agree with Solnit's conclusions or viewpoints. You've likely already seen the other sides of Katrina and 9/11 in the news. This book will help build a holistic view of those events and drive a skeptical view of future disaster coverage. There are lots of small issues that combine to drive the missing star. The writing and viewpoints can be repetitive and meandering. The section on the Mexico City earthquake doesn't fit in well with the other disasters. Bringing more international disasters would have strengthened the book and eliminated lingering doubts about why they were excluded. I really wish she had made the connection between disasters and war to create a more holistic view of the human nature shown in the book's examples. Many soldiers coming back from deployments have the same stories to tell with smiling faces and fondness about the meaning and connections they miss despite the horrific conditions they were in. Given the current political climate I also wish she would have examined the different political responses to 9/11 and Katrina. She does not gloss over Democratic failings, but she also does not cover them as comprehensively or in the same way as Republicans. Non-partisan political reckonings are desperately needed today. If the Republican failings are truly more damning let the facts speak for themselves.

Rebecca Skolnit's book should become important to us, because we already seem to be working our way through what could well become a whole series of disasters and catastrophes (thanks to the author for clarifying the distinction). It seems sociologists have been studying disasters for decades, and they've determined that in the face of sudden disaster, histories of specific events show that *the assumption that a collapse of the structures of authority and official response will result in mob behavior* is in terrible error -- it's a myth, an urban legend. Instead, it seems that our neighbors are much more likely to act altruistically and creatively. They are most likely to rapidly improvise ways to effect rescue, meet immediate needs and organize ad hoc encampments and communities that support survival and safety. Describing these grassroots social spaces and the negative reaction of authorities with a clear voice and generous dollops of humor and irony, Skolnit sees in these self-generated kitchens and aid stations a beautiful hint of what our lives could be, if left to our own devices. I love her voice -- and she's a riveting storyteller. On the other hand, the elites have left behind a marked, bloody history of foolish decisions, well-armed panic and overreaction, fed by a dangerous mythology of looting mobs. Skolnit has confirmed something that should be obvious to those of us who remember the lies we were fed by the media, later disproved: there's a difference between "requisitioning needed supplies" in an emergency and "opportunistic theft", which constitutes looting. Time and again, it seems elites have deployed martial forces against a population struggling to survive, help not particularly on the way. I loved reading the accounts of people's responses to Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy in comparison to events much earlier in the century, like The San Francisco Earthquake and the explosion of munitions in Halifax -- healthy, heroic parallels that are moving to read. It was good to see the heroism of women and underprivileged youngsters acknowledged. It was good to trace the philosophical underpinnings of our respective stances -- for and against 'the mob'. Initially interested in another of this author's titles, I HAD to read this one first, having been a first responder in years gone by. It spoke to my experience of bystanders' readiness to be of help -- or at least, to bear caring witness. PS -- Presently, I've got a student who, until recently, was studying to be a cop. This goal was called into question by events in Ferguson and the on-going struggle along the border -- but even more by *the increasingly general militarization of the police*. This is something he doesn't want to be a part of, so he's changed his major to sociology, without particularly knowing where to go with it. I'm thinking of buying my student this book. Maybe it will help him clarify things.

Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: The extraordinary communities that arise in disasters. Viking. Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist and author of more than twenty books. Through researching disaster including the San Francisco 1906 earthquake, the Halifax explosion of 1917, the Mexico City earthquake, New York City 09/11, and the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina, Solnit explores that seemingly temporary sense of solidarity, empathy, charity, and generosity. She described how a prevailing misconception is that when a disaster occurs, "people [become] so overwhelmed by fear and selfish desire to survive that their judgment, their social bonds, event their humanity are overwhelmed." In reality, this isn't true, instead, people experience a sense of purposefulness, interconnectedness, and a commitment to serve their fellow citizens. As though there is a short window of time, when everything is stripped away, people tend to prioritize one another while experiencing a sense of solidarity. From disaster sociology, we learn how grassroot responses serve to activate what was described as "elite panic." Disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney observed how "elites fear disruption of the social order" which challenges their legitimacy. "Elite panic" is amplified due to elites' "fear of social disorder, fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; and willingness to resort to deadly force." Media further amplifies elite fears by perpetuating disaster myths around lawlessness and the need for strict social control. In highlighting how human behavior is different than expected, different than portrayed in disaster narratives, Solnit shares a glimpse of hope. We humans have an enormous capacity for love, care, and support of one another. This would be an excellent book for people interested in leadership, disaster sociology, and the effects of media.

I really, really wanted to love this book. The accounts that Solint gathered were incredible and, as a low-key "prepper" type, it really opened my eyes and cause me to re-prioritize how I was planning my preps and focus more on community mutual aid. However, as much as the subject matter fascinated me, I just could not get into Solint's writing style. Being a left-libertarian, I'm amenable to Anarchy, but she comes across as preachy, overly erudite, and presumes a level of philosophical political knowledge out of her reader and you will likely feel lost or bored without it. In the end, as much as the historical examples interested me, I only managed to finish 3/4 of the book before needing to shelve it. If you're looking for a book on Anarchist theory with a smattering of interesting real-world examples scattered throughout, you'll probably like this book. But if you're looking for the inverse - a book of practical history with just a hint of philosophy - you might have the same experience as me and be a bit disappointed. However, I still highly recommend this book to others, if only as an eye-opener to get people out of their "lone survivor" mindsets when it comes to prepping.

I’m over 200 pages into this book and I love it! The author has done such a great job in supporting her assertion that “extraordinary communities arise in disaster.” She also does a lovely job of tying different disasters together to provide lots of examples of the ideas she is putting forth. It’s a highly optimistic and hope-filled book. Highly recommend!

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.

The singular optimism expressed in this book is remarkable, all the more because of its settings - chapters are set in some of the most devastating disasters in recent history. They include the earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City; London during the blitz, New York on 9/11 and New Orleans when Katrina hit. She makes the contrarian point that masses of people actually behave quite well, with courage and altruism when disasters hit, but often times the elites panic, desperate to preserve or re instate the inequalities they have long fostered. Her point, and it is very well documented here, is that the "stiff upper lip" that the Brits showed during the Blitz, was not unique to British culture, but rather the norm in disasters. The author shows that we often exhibit a co operative "help each other out" mentality in the face of real disaster and wonders why we are not able to maintain it. But she also suggests that in some ways we do. This is a broad book, that cites many different examples and may be fairly criticized for not following through on the aftermath of each one. I think such a choice would have required Solnit to focus entirely on one event. If you would prefer that approach try Rising Tide, John Barry's masterpiece of the 1927 Mississippi River. Highly recommended.

This is a game-changing book. Everyone ought to read it. Solnit documents, in clear and engaging style, the myth of panic among people in the midst of tragedies such as the California earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, etc. If there is any panic, it's among the privileged administrative class, who see in everyday people's cooperation a threat to the established order and the personal domination of the privileged. Read it; you won't be disappointed.

Nothing can resemble me more than this reading the exact same feeling and description where if “private life matters “ you don’t give a damn for it when you gather the collectively spirit of people struggling under destruction and debris and you need to turn into action no matter what . No time to analyze nor to cry or complain but to act and people became one not even social position nor wealthiness but to help and aid the needed . After disaster a new culture and social behavior arises and life goes on where “Joy too matters “ Delighted to read Rebecca Solnit and ready to follow her through other books titles ,,

mag die Autorin gerne

Challenged media view of panicking masses and gave measured optimism in ordinary people. In the light of covid it explains how we got on and supported each other. Worth reading and to learn to trust our neighbours

Just as stated great quality