Grim Reality
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
By Rebecca Solnit
30 Aug, 2016
Miscellaneous Reviews
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Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is an unmitigated attack on niceness, kittens, and chocolate … or at least on one of the essential assumptions of modern society. Waterboard an author and the odds are they will eventually confess they believe society is perpetually poised on the brink of collapse, requiring only the impetus of some calamity, natural or otherwise, for that collapse to be realized. This is a widespread belief: it informs our entertainment and it shapes public policy.
There is just one problem. It’s not actually true. Not the way its believers believe it to be true.