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Loading... The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Whyby Amanda Ripley
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Ripley's look on disaster behavior - both from the individual and group point of view - makes an original topic and librarians seems to have a hard time categorizing the book: Borders put it under 'hiking and camping', the publisher under 'self-help'. I do not agree with all her interpretations: Neuroimaging research is cited too uncritically without a discussion on the inherent methodological problems in this kind of science, crowd crushing is not necessarily a problem associated with panic: At the Roskilde Festival Pearl Jam deaths there were no crowd panic - as far as I know; and crawling over the seats in airplane disasters seems to be frowned upon. At times her writing style is a bit to 'journalistic' for my taste, but overall she defines and covers her area well, - an area that seems to have be thinly covered before, e.g., few seems to have written about hero behavior. (  ) fnielsen | Jul 20, 2009 |  a good YA book . (  ) hollysfollies | Apr 10, 2009 | susansw | Nov 14, 2008 | What do you think you would do in a life and death situation? Nothing, wait for someone to tell you what to do, gather up as many of your things as possible, do what everyone else is doing, become a hero? It could be any of these things and you'll never know until you have no choice. But you can learn from survivors. Here are stories of survivors of sinking ships, plane crashes, fires, natural disasters, 9/11 and more and what brain scientists, psychologists and disaster experts have learned from them. What do they have in common? What was it really like for them? Fast and fascinating read! (BTW -- read that emergency card in your airplane seat pocket and listen to the flight attendant ... no matter how many times you've heard it!) (  )1  g3orgia | Sep 2, 2008 | This isn't the sort of book I usually read. It's nonfiction, and I mostly read fantasy and horror, with some occasional science fiction. The nonfiction I do read usually falls under the Forteana category, or odd bits of history, or general weirdness. This is a book about why people act the wasy they do in disasters. Ripley basically boils it all down to one thing: evolution. When people freeze up, it's because freezing up can protct you from some predators. When you act heroic, it's because that can help you get laid. When you help others, it's because we're communal creatures.Apparently, what people don't actually do (very often) is panic, which is surprising. She also details the various stages people go through in disasters and illustrates them with stories of actual disasters. She interviews 9-11 surviors, Virginia Tech survivors, surviors of fires, floods, earthqukes, etc. There's not much in the way of practical advice, because you can't really know what how you'll act in a disaster until you've been in one. You can get certain types of training that will help--such as that given to police, firefighters, the military, etc.--but even that isn't a guarantee. This is an interesting book though, and it's just the sort of thing you might want to read if you'd like to know more about disasters and how to survibe them. ( )1 yoyogod | Aug 29, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:20 -0400)
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