A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

There was nothing remotely ordinary about the event. Take the case of the Mont Blanc, a cargo ship stuffed to the gunwales with munitions, which was rammed by another ship trying to pass it and then blew up in the Halifax harbor in the winter of 1917. Solnit’s description of the older events is especially compelling as they are less well known and the accretion of a century’s time makes them look, sound and feel more exotic once Solnit excavates and narrates them. The research is meticulous where possible, the author has interviewed survivors or witnesses. While referencing a litany of disasters across time and space, Solnit focuses on five: the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, an explosion in a Nova Scotia harbor more than a decade later, the devastating 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the destruction of the twin towers on 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 assault on the Gulf Coast. The cataclysmic events make for gripping, if grim, reading. The result is almost always captivating and compelling, not least because she is unusually gifted at mixing dispassionate narration with fervent, first-person experience. In taut case studies of North American disasters that reach from Nova Scotia to Mexico City and from 1906 to 9/11, she blends reportage with research and folds in a kind of theological musing with political enthusiasm. Solnit is neither naive nor blind to the misery out of which she finds faith forged.

How to tease out, much less emphasize, threads of hope or community from the shattered spaces and lives of calamity? How can supposedly redemptive, even joyful, qualities emerging amid horror be explored so as to not render the interpreter naive, callous or both? In contrast to the presuppositions of the powerful (and Hollywood), steadfast about the inevitability of anarchic mayhem and riot, Solnit makes a convincing case for the sheer dignity and decency of people coming together amid terror. A careful student of the sociology of catastrophe, Solnit argues that the human experience of disaster so alters convention that a different social milieu can emerge, if briefly, within them one distinguished by altruism and the absence of social hierarchies. In “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster,” this writer of impressive versatility explores disasters and the goodness that can come to characterize them. Yet Rebecca Solnit sees human possibilities inherent in the certainty of big trouble. Whatever their cause, disasters will be born of some mixture of human and natural action or inaction, lives will be irrevocably altered, and absurd numbers of people will die. The bad news is that more disasters are coming, arising from any number of sources: climate change, widespread infrastructural vulnerabilities, toxic threats brewed at cellular or weapons-grade levels, seismic or oceanic volatility, and so on and so on.

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit