A Paradise Built in Hell The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

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 

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