A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

Being Californian, she begins the book at home with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fires that raged in its wake. Solnit is perhaps our most acute and creative public intellectual, a prolific and seemingly effortless writer whose beat is culture and politics and who regularly collaborates with visual artists of various sorts. In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters, Rebecca Solnit addresses the causes and consequences of a category of events-earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and so forth-“telling them together” in Davidson’s sense as a political happenings, namely “disasters.” We invoke causal relations, and the place of events in some scheme of such relations, in this view, in order to give them meaning, to differentiate them, and to group them under common descriptions. Not only are these the features that often interest us about events, but they are features guaranteed to individuate them in the sense not only of telling them apart but also of telling them together.” 1 In an obscure academic essay originally written in the late 1960’s, philosopher Donald Davidson observes “it is easy to appreciate why we so often identify or describe events in terms of their causes and effects. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.Reviewed by James Johnson, University of Rochester She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities?

The author of Men Explain Things to Me explores the moments of altruism and generosity that arise in the aftermath of disaster

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit