A Paradise Built in Hell

Reviews / Votes

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 [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 * 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 * 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 * The New York Review of Books * 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 *