Book 27: The Unthinkable

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes- and Why

Amanda Ripley

For situations so aptly called "unthinkable," disasters of all varieties tend to occupy a large portion of our collective imagination. Hardly a week passes by when the 24-hour news cycle isn't hysterical about an earthquake, shooting, or accident, and yet this fascination is paired with a strange reluctance to really think about these incidents from a practical perspective, ignoring why they happen and focusing instead on how we react and how we might better train ourselves to survive. Amanda Ripley briefly lays out this scenario at the beginning of her fascinating book The Unthinkable, and brilliantly answers her own call for answers. Written for a general audience, Ripley is sharp and informative without being condescending or overly technical. The book is certainly for the thinking reader, but actively engages its audience. While this buddy-buddy feel can occasionally get annoying, the book maintains its focus on practicality, never straying far from the realm of actual historical incidents and their demonstrable effects. This makes the book an effective mix of history, psychology, and neurology, written with the assistance of those involved in all aspects of disastrous incidents, from survivors to neuroscientists.

The effort to locate and directly collect survivors' testimonies lends a great deal of credibility to an otherwise casual book, and allows Ripley to create both a framework and compelling individual stories. She tells her tales is a meaningful order, utilizing a specific incident or theme as the backbone of each particular chapter and tracing human reactions from the onset of trouble (or even before) through the heat of the moment. Aside form simply making sense, the organizational scheme lends the book that sense of narrative that is so often lacking from nonfiction and insists that human nature maintains its rightful place at the center of the work. The writing is as accessible as the content, and while Ripley's interest occasionally strays, the diversions are at least interesting and tangentially related to the matter at hand. Most importantly, the book follows through on its premise, offering integrated insights into historical events and providing a basic framework both for future study and, to a lesser extent, for practical action. She is persuasive without being preachy and offers practical solutions for the problems she presents. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes- and Why is among that rare class of nonfiction books capable of informing and entertaining a wide audience of receptive readers while retaining a sense of focus, mission, and perspective.

Grade: A