Why Disaster Books Make Good Reading Now | Advantages

John Updike was visiting his family in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001. He later wrote about watching Manhattan explode and collapse that day as if it were occasional television, a perfect day with a great reception, although every time he follows it, he hopes in the end, ” The nightmare remains. “

It came back to me this summer when I read an unnatural story about natural disasters, man-made disasters, pandemics, inferno, dust storms, earthquakes, and climate extinctions. I was reading Octavia Butler’s “The Sower’s Tale,” her 1993 novel set in the United States dissolving in chaos – “You’re supposed to be dirty now. If you’re clean, you’re targeting yourself” – then go to TikTok to see Beirut’s explosion from angles Infinite camera. I delved into Stephen King’s “The Stand,” finding myself touched by articles similar to “Our City” investigating random Americans, finding loneliness and regret as a deadly virus raged.

But when Hurricane Rogers hit Park, my window showed less than YouTube.

I was immersed in photographing the disaster, even if it was the real thing, and a real virus, had sprung up outside.

That seems satisfying.

“The Great Chicago Fire: The Destruction and Revival of a Famous American City,” by Carl Smith. The author says the traditional narrative of the Chicago fire portrays it as a natural disaster that led to a stronger Chicago. “But it was anything but. Chicago burned out because it was built in a sloppy way.”

Atlantic Grove

To read “The Great Chicago Fire: The Destruction and Revival of an Iconic American City” by Northwestern University historian Carl Smith, a wonderful new history has been described as nothing less than the first accessible popular “carefully researched” account of the fire. It arrives in October, a year before the 150th anniversary of the disaster that Chicago insists has shaped the look and character of the city. Smith’s book is, in many ways, a narrative about the narrative that Chicago itself tells.

Smith told me, “Almost immediately after the fire, Chicago was exchanging quality for quantity – not only could we have lit a big fire, we had the biggest fire. The city quickly took over the fire to match the already existing myths that Chicago was indomitable. So the scale of the fire immediately serves a very attractive subjective myth – for a city that is only about 40 years old! Fire presents this instant epic of creation, and Chicago becomes the rare place that celebrates, even now, its destruction as a reminder of its civic spirit, presumably much stronger than the fire itself. .

Disaster narratives are of course our way of dealing with the possibility of a disaster.

Or so countless cultural historians and psychologists say – and they usually speak of the fantasies of destruction and resilience that have long been the specialty of films.

Sometimes, reading about disasters gives you more insight into solutions than live with them.

Shutterstock

Yet literature, as any disaster addict will attest, is always a more exciting and seductive way to plunge into disaster, presenting a scene of disaster with a cruel reality, often slowing the explosion and death long enough to give us a long ugly look at ourselves. For example, when Chicago was burning, the papers of 1871 were reminiscent of the curious crash on Lake Shore Drive, which is only a worse kind: Smith wrote that some bystanders of the fire turned the city’s destruction into an early backdoor, “drank a lot” and laughed (then Beg more) as firefighters tried to clean them with fire hoses.

One of my first memories of the porn disaster was a science magazine I found in a neighborhood drugstore. While my grandmother was shopping, she vanished into a cover story about what to expect from a nuclear exchange. Since I lived an afternoon cycling to a nuclear submarine factory, I saw that I wouldn’t actually live to see cities melt away or the highways crowded with evacuees. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the magazine, but decades later I remember not a sense of resilience but of despair. It struck me in my head as I was reading “Song Sung,” a new insightful novel by horror writer Paul Tremblay, about a rabies-like disease that leads to familiar scenes from quarantines and crowded hospitals. But instead of traffic, the hero doctor sees empty roads and thinks of a “suddenly irreplaceable truth: Is this the end?”

In “The Children’s Bible,” the fairy tale of a new novel by Lydia Millet, society collapses as a group of wealthy parents and their children vacation in a large home for the weekend.

Norton

It’s definitely in a “Children’s Bible,” the fairy tale of a new novel by Lydia Millet that you’ll likely hear more about as the Annual Book Awards are announced this fall. Society collapses as a group of wealthy parents and their children vacation in a large home for the weekend. Anxious at first, adults drink themselves in denial and ignorance as their children set out to save themselves from the inevitable arrival of some unknown world-changing disaster. Scientists said (the world) is now ending, and philosophers have said it always ends. Historians have said that there have been dark ages before. Politicians claimed that everything would be fine. Adjustments have been made. “

Same killer strings of complacency in “Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy” by journalists Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano, their real-life account of the 2018 Camp Fire in California that killed more than 85 people. With success comes certainty, they wrote, and after the Chicago Fire and San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (which resulted in double devastating fires), “it was hard even to imagine that a fire could invade modern American society” equipped with fire symbols, emergency exits and first responders.

It is a denial that, in fact, can become an integral part of the stories we tell ourselves to plan for those disasters. See climate change. Or read John Mawalm’s new book, “This is an Opportunity! All-American City Shaking, Voice Brings It Together,” about the 1964 Great Earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska. It is the local government agencies “formally responsible for keeping Anchorage from collapsing” that immediately disintegrate. The book focuses, instead, on Jenny Chance, a radio reporter who stays on the air for days taking stories to society, and acts as their bond.

The beauty of a good literary disaster novel – think of “Grapes of Wrath,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cradle of the Cat”, “Saving Bones” by Jasmine Ward, even Elizabeth Colbert’s notable reports in “Field Notes of a Catastrophe” – partly because he avoids the psychedelic similarity in Survival Tales The inevitability that makes many disaster films such arduous: after the main event (destruction), 45 minutes of delicately written characters get stuck. As Professor Don DeLillo says in Don DeLillo’s book “White Noise” (which itself is characterized by a chemical spill that leads to an “airborne toxic event”), “only disaster catches our attention”. Once the scene is complete, only who is left and what went wrong, and although many disaster films do not have particularly convincing answers, the clever author realizes that the disaster is only the first round.

The beauty of a good literary disaster novel – such as “Saving the Bones” by Jasmine Ward – is partly in its avoidance of the psychedelic resemblance to the inevitable tales of survival that make many disaster films such absurd.

Bloomsbury

In “Notes From the End of the World” last spring, Mark O’Connell travels the world in view of the Great Depression and how people face the end of the world, and decides, “What did I really mean by the end of the world, after all, if not losing my position within it?” For someone who lives under Bridge, or slept in his car, reached this end long ago. They’ve been stumbling into rubble probably for years, so if you have time to think about art depicting the end of the world, you’re in luck. We call this “privilege” now.

Chicago swells up its chest and somehow, it built a reputation on the same self-interest.

Smith said that the traditional narrative of the Chicago fire portrays it as a natural disaster that led to a stronger Chicago. “But it was anything but. Chicago burned out because it was built in a dirty way. Even after they were told it was flammable, the politicians did nothing. After the fire, it was largely rebuilt with wood. And what safety changes were made, they came after kicking The fire department remained a poorly regulated political organization, and it was difficult to develop new building codes because the wealthy owners resisted. Ninety thousand had their homes, but without money in the bank, there was no safety net. Meanwhile, the elite group of Chicago residents became Worried about the new immigrants – even as they relied on these same people to rebuild. “

When Smith told people about the book he was working on, their inevitable question was: What could be left to say about the biggest disaster in Chicago history?

He told them “everything.”

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