The Unthinkable : Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why

Disasters strike any time, any place, and we like to think we would respond responsibly and quickly. Amanda Ripley’s book, The Unthinkable : Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why(2008. ANF 155.935 RIP) examines some well-known disasters and looks into why some people survived and others did not; why some people are heroes and others panic.

As a journalist for Time magazine, she has covered many disasters and gained insights into what needs to be done to up the odds of survival. She met with survivors of 9/11 and found all of them asking the same thing – “Why no one had prepared them”. It seems that most emergency plans are designed to meet the needs of emergency personnel, not regular people who will be first on the scene. If everyone knew what to do, there would always be a trained first responder.

Ripley cites the example of the JW Marriott Hotel beach during the 2004 Thailand tsunami where no one died because a little girl had seen a video of a Hawaiian tsunami and recognized the warning signs. Credit goes to her parents for acting on her warning.

Her website (www.TheUnthinkable.com) is a thinking-person’s survival guide that advises us to conduct a “dress-rehearsal for our brains”. This website and her book both emphasize the awareness of risk that we all need to become survivors and maybe even heroes.

Find this book in the Library’s catalogue

Taken with permission from Gloria Novak’s “Good Reads at the Library”