In “A Paradise Built in Hell” Ms. Solnit probes five disasters in depth: the 1906 earthquake and fires in San Francisco, the Halifax munitions cargo ship explosion of 1917, the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, the events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. She also writes about the London blitz, Chernobyl and many other upheavals and examines the growing field of disaster studies.
These disasters differ, of course, in fundamental ways. But the altruistic human response to them was consistent, Ms. Solnit writes. She compares the odd joy of living in their wake to existing in benign anarchies of the kind Thomas Paine described in “The Rights of Man.”
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