Being Californian, she begins the book at home with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fires that raged in its wake. Solnit is perhaps our most acute and creative public intellectual, a prolific and seemingly effortless writer whose beat is culture and politics and who regularly collaborates with visual artists of various sorts. In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters, Rebecca Solnit addresses the causes and consequences of a category of events-earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and so forth-“telling them together” in Davidson’s sense as a political happenings, namely “disasters.” We invoke causal relations, and the place of events in some scheme of such relations, in this view, in order to give them meaning, to differentiate them, and to group them under common descriptions. Not only are these the features that often interest us about events, but they are features guaranteed to individuate them in the sense not only of telling them apart but also of telling them together.” 1 In an obscure academic essay originally written in the late 1960’s, philosopher Donald Davidson observes “it is easy to appreciate why we so often identify or describe events in terms of their causes and effects. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disasters. Reviewed by James Johnson, University of Rochester
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