Rethinking Disaster Recovery

Reviews / Votes

The text is well written with excellent incorporation of current theory and research in the sociology of disasters. Further, the narrative style of the book provides for a quick read. This text would be a useful supplement to graduate disaster courses, especially since the chapters raise interesting questions that doctoral students could undertake as research projects. As a disaster scholar, the book provided thought-provoking information in a format different from traditional journal articles or scholarly texts and helped contextualize the research from Hurricane Katrina.... The book also highlights issues that researchers of disasters hope they only in rare cases have to experience personally, while encouraging us to analyze our own sociological lens and how our research intersects with our lives, our colleagues' lives, and the lives of the survivors we study. * Contemporary Sociology * Rethinking Disaster Recovery is a pioneering collection of essays, and this for two reasons. First, it is written by scholars who themselves experienced the massive disordering that was, and in many ways still is, Hurricane Katrina. And second, each essay, in its own way, reminds us of what there is to learn if we follow the crooked path of disaster long after the cameras are turned off. -- Steve Kroll-Smith, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Only a catastrophe the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina striking a major urban region could have impacted so many social institutions, including its universities, that the one university in the city to have had a sociology doctoral program [Tulane] could have been the source of a such a robust core of 'survivor scholars' who have contributed to such an interesting and important book of personal and professional experiences out of the event. -- Shirley Laska, University of New Orleans