I started this during a stretch of flooding here and finished it during a run of wildfire smoke, which is not how I’d recommend timing your reading list, but it made every chapter land harder than it might have otherwise. Solnit’s thesis is almost the opposite of what disaster movies train you to expect, that in the actual aftermath of earthquakes, floods, and explosions, most people behave with remarkable generosity and improvised competence, forming spontaneous mutual-aid networks within hours, and that the panic and violence we associate with disaster is disproportionately an elite phenomenon, officials and authorities so certain the public will turn savage that they respond with force and end up causing the very chaos they feared.

The case studies do the heavy lifting here, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the Halifax explosion, and a long, genuinely infuriating section on the response to Hurricane Katrina, where the elite panic Solnit describes gets a name and a body count. What struck me most was a thread I hadn’t expected going in, that a real minority of people report something close to joy in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, not because the disaster itself was good, but because the ordinary isolation of daily life briefly falls away and people actually talk to their neighbors, and there’s something aching about how many of Solnit’s interview subjects seem to miss that connection once things go back to “normal.”

Solnit’s earlier book on Muybridge apparently reads as dense and difficult, based on what I’ve heard from others, but nothing about this one felt like work, the prose is clear and the argument builds steadily without losing its emotional register. Five stars, one of the more hopeful books about catastrophe I’ve read, and I’ve already recommended it to three different people this month.