A Paradise Built in Hell – Hill Nadell Literary Agency

Rebecca Solnit
A Paradise Built in Hell
(Penguin, August 2009)

Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster, whether manmade or natural, people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities?

In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

Praise for A Paradise Built in Hell

“Rebecca Solnit is the kind of rugged, off-road public intellectual America doesn’t produce often enough.”
–The New York Times

“[A] landmark work that gives an impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disaster…Solnit is an exemplar of that perpetually endangered species, the free-ranging public intellectual, bound to no institution or academic orthodoxy.”
–Tom Vanderbilt, in The New York Times Book Review

“Solnit is an indefatigable student of whatever subject she undertakes, blending historical research with boots-on-the-ground journalism…and cultural criticism.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit presents a withering critique of modern capitalist society by examining five catastrophes…Her accounts of these five events are so stirring that her book is worth reading for its storytelling alone.”
–Dan Baum, in The Washington Post

“A Paradise Built in Hell is an eye-opening account of how much hope and solidarity emerges in the face of sudden disaster… These lessons will matter enormously in the months ahead as the pandemic gives way to the fight about what kind of society will be erected in its aftermath. But they also offer deep comfort now, as antidotes not just to feelings of helplessness but loneliness.”
—David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine

Listen to the CBC Radio’s interview with Rebecca Solnit
Read Rebecca Solnit’s interview with Time Magazine
Charles Marohen recommends A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL on Resilience
Listen to Rebecca Solnit’s interview on WBUR Boston’s NPR
Read Rebecca Solnit’s piece, “‘The impossible has already happened’: what the coronavirus can teach us about hope,” in The Guardian

Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received the prestigious Lannan Literary Award.