![]() ![]() This makes the question of human nature critical. ![]() Increasingly, environmentalists are turning away from considering humans and the environment separately. What disaster reveals, she argues, is the human longing for purpose and meaning - needs unfulfilled by a life devoted to getting and spending. Her examples inspire, not as a stirring catalogue of good-doing but as a thoughtful assessment of what the human response to disaster can tell us about our political and social structures. Her book tells the stories of ordinary people who respond to extraordinary situations in what might seem like extraordinary ways - but are actually, according to Solnit’s argument, quite typical. I picked up Paradise with trepidation born of jingoistic overload.įortunately, Solnit is too keen a thinker to fall prey to sentiment. I did: I live four blocks north of the World Trade Center site and was evacuated from my home for over a month. ![]() Those who lived through any of the more recent events may cringe, anticipating bromides on human goodness and the American spirit. Here she investigates the startlingly egalitarian community responses to a range of natural and manmade disasters, focusing largely on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 Halifax ship explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. 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. THE TITLE OF Rebecca Solnit’s new book sounds uncharacteristically inspirational. ![]()
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