sexual assault.) A particular emphasis is given to events that the reader will likely be familiar such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, but the book also opens up the reader to events they may have scarcely heard of from the many crushing deaths in Mecca during recent Hajj pilgrimages to the Halifax harbor incident of 1917. Over the course of eight chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and ancillary material, the author presents cases involving airplane crashes, tsunami, hurricanes, police shootings, hostage situations, fires, stampedes (of humans by humans), and even touches on the psychology of tragedies of a personal nature (e.g. trying to get a carry-on out of the overhead compartment as though one is at the gate at Heathrow Airport when in fact one is sinking into the ocean while the crashed airliner one is in is being buffeted by ocean waves. a plane explodes in mid-air with said person in it), but a surprising number die who could have walked to safety if they’d have managed to get moving – and some die because they play out a mental script that makes no sense contextually, e.g. Who dies having had the capacity to survive? Obviously, some people fail to survive because they face a fundamentally unsurvivable event (e.g. Of course, in the process she answers the converse question of who dies and why? By that I’m specifically referring to those who die while facing the same situations as survivors. Ripley investigates a range of disasters and tragedies – natural and man-made – with an eye toward her sub-titular question of who survives and why. The Unthinkable was selected by Hudson Booksellers as one of the Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2008.The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why by Amanda Ripley A documentary based on the book, Surviving Disaster with Amanda Ripley, aired on PBS in 2012. The Unthinkable was published in 15 countries including the United States, the UK, Brazil and China.
In this inspiring mix of narrative, science and participatory journalism, award-winning Time Magazine writer Amanda Ripley reveals how human fear circuits and crowd dynamics work, why our instincts sometimes misfire in modern calamities, and how we can do much, much better. Why do we freeze in the middle of a fire? How can we override this instinct? Why do our senses of sight and hearing change during a terrorist attack? Why are most heroes men? But very few of us know what to expect until it is too late.īy combining the stories of survivors with research into how the brain works under extreme duress, The Unthinkable tries to bring light into civilization’s darkest moments.
In big disasters, regular people are the first and most important rescuers on the scene. Half of Americans have been affected by a disaster of some kind.
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