Name: A Paradise Built in Hell
Price: 18.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Rebecca Solnit
ISBN: 9780143118077

A New York Times Notable Book

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

“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 Chronicle

A stirring investigation into what happens in the aftermath of disaster, from the author of Orwell’s Roses

The 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 disaster’s 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.

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

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?

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. 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. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

Praise for A Paradise Built in Hell:

“Everyone feels alone in a crisis . . . It needn’t 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 we’re 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 . . . there’s 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

A Paradise Built in Hell

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By Rebecca Solnit