Book No. 99 of 2020
In college I took a fascinating course on disasters in which we primarily analyzed the causes and immediate effects of natural and man-made disasters; this book goes further than that to examine what disasters reveal about society and human nature.
Solnit covers a variety of disasters through modern history, from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and she uncovers a number of startling insights at both the micro and macro level. One of her main theses is that on the local level, disasters spark pure altruism and community, and that the image of panicked, anarchical violence is largely a myth (driven by media and popular narrative)—that in fact the majority of violence comes from “elite panic,” the tendency of the governing minority to guard their own power and property and act in the belief that the masses will resort to savagery. Solnit connects her findings to how society functions at large, how power structures form in the vacuum of the uncontrollable (and are poorly equipped to handle disasters), how existing systemic ills like racism, class divide, etc. are unearthed or exacerbated in a crisis, and what disasters reveal about what is missing from our society. She very deftly looks at how complex and interconnected societal systems are (in a way that I can’t summarize for you, sorry).
Reading this book in the midst of a protracted disaster (hello, pandemic) was definitely an experience, and Solnit’s observation that disasters beget social upheaval and revolutionary action felt eerily prescient. It helped for making sense of everything going on, though a lot of passages and topics felt almost painful to dissect. (One of the hardest chapters to read was one on the racialized violence and senseless killing post-Katrina, when elite panic led to white homeowners gunning down any Black people they saw, based on stereotypes and their valuing of property over lives, amidst the backdrop of an already bungled response to the hurricane.)
Overall this was a fascinating, insightful, and terribly relevant read, although I do quibble with some of Solnit’s suggestions. (I would disagree with her that PTSD is over-diagnosed—while I agree 100% that trauma can breed resilience, I don’t think said resilience denies traumatic effects, and I disagree with her on therapy being overused; on the contrary, I really think we would be better off if more people got therapy.)
Similar Reads
Very similar themes as Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (which cites this book heavily).
Some of the takeaways map onto the same core themes as Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.