A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster b

Description: A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit Originally published: New York: Viking, 2009. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description "A landmark book that gives impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters" (The New York Times Book Review) from the author of the memoirRecollections of My Nonexistence"Solnit argues that disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, each one a summons to rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of genuine altruism, civic life, grassroots community, and meaningful work."-San Francisco ChronicleChosen as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and Chicago TribuneThe most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disasters grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.A New York Times Notable BookChosen as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune"A landmark book that gives impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters" -The New York Times Book Review"Solnit argues that disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, each one a summons to rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of genuine altruism, civic life, grassroots community, and meaningful work." -San Francisco ChronicleA stirring investigation into what happens in the aftermath of disaster, from the author of Orwells RosesThe most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disasters grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become-one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local. Author Biography Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows- Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust- A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent- On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award. Review Praise for A Paradise Built in Hell:"Everyone feels alone in a crisis . . . It neednt be that way. In fact, as the incomparable Rebecca Solnit has shown throughout her long, meandering, brilliant career, but especially in [this book], it must not be. A Paradise Built in Hell is an eye-opening account of how much hope and solidarity emerges in the face of sudden disaster . . . [These lessons] offer deep comfort now, as antidotes not just to feelings of helplessness but loneliness." —David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine "[An] expansive argument about human resilience . . . Though Solnit mobilizes decades of sociological research to support her argument, the chapters themselves move effortlessly through subtle philosophical readings and vivid narrations."—The New Yorker"What will it be like to live not on the relatively stable planet that civilization has known throughout the ten thousand years of the Holocene, but on the amped-up and careening planet were quickly creating? With her remarkable and singular book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit has thought harder about the answer to that question than anyone else. Her answer is strangely and powerfully hopeful. As she proves with inspired historiography, disasters often produce remarkable temporary communities—paradises of a sort amid the rubble, where people, acting on their own and without direction from the authorities, manage to provide for each other." —Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books"Thought-provoking . . . captivating and compelling . . . theres a hopeful, optimistic, even contagious quality to this superb book."—Los Angeles Times"Far-reaching and large-spirited."—San Francisco Chronicle "Stirring . . . fascinating . . . presents a withering critique of modern capitalist society by examining five catastrophes . . . Her account of these events are so stirring that her book is worth reading for its storytelling alone. . . . [An] exciting and important contribution to our understanding of ourselves."—The Washington Post Promotional From the author of Men Explain Things to Me - "A landmark book that gives impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters" (The New York Times Book Review)"The freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature Ive come across in years." -Bill McKibben Chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune Review Quote "Thought-provoking . . . captivating and compelling . . . theres a hopeful, optimistic, even contagious quality to this superb book." --Los Angeles Times "In her far-reaching and large-spirited new book, Solnit argues that disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, each one a summons to rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of genuine altruism, civic life, grassroots community, and meaningful work." --San Francisco Chronicle Promotional "Headline" From the author of Men Explain Things to Me - "A landmark book that gives impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters" ( The New York Times Book Review ) "The freshest, deepest, most optimistic account of human nature Ive come across in years." -Bill McKibben Chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times , Los Angeles Times , New Yorker , San Francisco Chronicle , Washington Post , and Chicago Tribune Excerpt from Book Prelude: Falling Together Who are you? Who are we? In times of crisis, these are life-and-death questions. Thousands of people survived Hurricane Katrina because grandsons or aunts or neighbors or complete strangers reached out to those in need all through the Gulf Coast and because an armada of boat owners from the surrounding communities and as far away as Texas went into New Orleans to pull stranded people to safety. Hundreds of people died in the aftermath of Katrina because others, including police, vigilantes, high government officials, and the media, decided that the people of New Orleans were too dangerous to allow them to evacuate the septic, drowned city or to rescue them, even from hospitals. Some who attempted to flee were turned back at gunpoint or shot down. Rumors proliferated about mass rapes, mass murders, and mayhem that turned out later to be untrue, though the national media and New Orleanss police chief believed and perpetuated those rumors during the crucial days when people were dying on rooftops and elevated highways and in crowded shelters and hospitals in the unbearable heat, without adequate water, without food, without medicine and medical attention. Those rumors led soldiers and others dispatched as rescuers to regard victims as enemies. Beliefs matter--though as many people act generously despite their beliefs as the reverse. Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters, wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a disaster or a greater good than the property in houses and stores around you. ( Citizen, in this book, means members of a city or community, not people in possession of legal citizenship in a nation.) What you believe shapes how you act. How you act results in life or death, for yourself or others, as in everyday life, only more so. Katrina was, like most disasters, also marked by altruism: of young men who took it upon themselves to supply water, food, diapers, and protection to the strangers stranded with them; of people who rescued or sheltered neighbors; of the uncounted hundreds or thousands who set out in boats--armed, often, but also armed with compassion--to find those who were stranded in the stag- nant waters and bring them to safety; of the two hundred thousand or more who (via the Internet site HurricaneHousing.org in the weeks after) volunteered to house complete strangers, mostly in their own homes, persuaded more by the pictures of suffering than the rumors of mon- strosity; of the uncounted tens of thousands of volunteers who came to the Gulf Coast to rebuild and restore. In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this. But belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism. From earthquake-shattered San Francisco in 1906 to flooded New Orleans in 2005, innocents have been killed by people who believed or asserted that their victims were the criminals and they themselves were the protectors of the shaken order. Beliefs matter. "Today Cain is still killing his brother" proclaims a faded church mural in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, which was so devas- tated by the failure of the government levees. In quick succession, the Book of Genesis gives us the creation of the universe, the illicit acquisi- tion of knowledge, the expulsion from Paradise, and the slaying of Abel by Cain, a second fall from grace into jealousy, competition, alienation, and violence. When God asks Cain where his brother is, Cain asks back, "Am I my brothers keeper?" He is refusing to say what God already knows: that the spilled blood of Abel cries out from the ground that has absorbed it. He is also raising one of the perennial social questions: are we beholden to each other, must we take care of each other, or is it every man for himself ? Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very con- cept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vac- illate about taking on others, especially those expressed through eco- nomic arrangements--including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation--the keeping of ones broth- ers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others. Bet- ter yet, I will take your wealth and add it to mine--if I believe that my well-being is independent of yours or pitted against yours--and justify my conduct as natural law. If I am not my brothers keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities. Thus does everyday life become a social disaster. Sometimes disaster intensifies this; sometimes it provides a remarkable reprieve from it, a view into another world for our other selves. When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up--not all, but the great preponderance--to become their brothers keepers. And that purposeful- ness and connectedness bring joy even amid death, chaos, fear, and loss. Were we to know and believe this, our sense of what is possible at any time might change. We speak of self-fulfilling prophesies, but any belief that is acted on makes the world in its image. Beliefs matter. And so do the facts behind them. The astonishing gap between common beliefs and actualities about disaster behavior limits the possibilities, and changing beliefs could fundamentally change much more. Horrible in itself, disas- ter is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sisters and brothers keeper. I landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, shortly after a big hurricane tore up the city in October of 2003. The man in charge of taking me around told me about the hurricane--not about the winds that roared at more than a hundred miles an hour and tore up trees, roofs, and telephone poles or about the seas that rose nearly ten feet, but about the neighbors. He spoke of the few days when everything was disrupted, and he lit up with happiness as he did so. In his neighborhood all the people had come out of their houses to speak with each other, aid each other, improvise a community kitchen, make sure the elders were okay, and spend time together, no longer strangers. "Everybody woke up the next morning and everything was different," he mused. "There was no electricity, all the stores were closed, no one had access to media. The consequence was that everyone poured out into the street to bear witness. Not quite a street party, but everyone out at once--it was a sense of happiness to see everybody even though we didnt know each other." His joy struck me powerfully. A friend told me of being trapped in a terrible fog, one of the dense tule fogs that overtakes Californias Central Valley periodically. On this occasion the fog mixed with dust from the cotton fields created a shroud so perilous that the highway patrol stopped all traffic on the highway. For two days she was stranded with many others in a small diner. She and her husband slept upright, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, in the banquettes of the diners booths. Although food and water began to run short, they had a marvelous time. The people gathered there had little in common, but they all opened up, began to tell each other the stories of their lives, and by the time the road was safe, my friend and her hus- band were reluctant to leave. But they went onward, home to New Mexico for the holidays, where everyone looked at them perplexedly as they told the story of their stranding with such ebullience. That time in the diner was the first time ever her partner, a Native American, had felt a sense of belonging in society at large. Such redemption amid disruption is common. It reminded me of how many of us in the San Francisco Bay Area had loved the Loma Prieta earthquake that took place three weeks before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Or loved not the earthquake but the way commu- nities had responded to it. It was alarming for most of us as well, devastat- ing for some, and fatal for sixty people (a very low death count for a major earthquake in an area inhabited by millions). When the subject of the quake came up with a new acquaintance, she too glowed with recollection about how her San Francisco neighborhood had, during the days the power was off, cooked up all its thawing frozen food and held barbecues on the street; how gregarious everyone had been, how people from all walks of life had mixed in candlelit bars that became community centers. Another friend recently remembered with unextinguished amazement that when he traveled the several miles from the World Series ba Details ISBN0143118072 Author Rebecca Solnit Short Title PARADISE BUILT IN HELL Language English ISBN-10 0143118072 ISBN-13 9780143118077 Media Book Format Paperback Audience Age 18-17 DEWEY 303.485 Residence San Francisco, CA, US Year 2010 Publication Date 2010-08-31 UK Release Date 2010-08-31 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States US Release Date 2010-08-31 Illustrator Gillian Flint Birth 1939 Death 1925 Affiliation Rick Ingrasci Position Illustrator Qualifications PsyD Pages 368 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Penguin USA Subtitle The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster Audience General NZ Release Date 2020-11-16 AU Release Date 2020-11-16 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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