Earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters are terrible—pain and suffering abounding, lives and homes destroyed. Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant new book documents and explains the other side of disasters: how they often sweep away the barriers that isolate people from each other under normal times, inspiring “the better angels of our nature” that President Abraham Lincoln evoked in our nation’s darkest days. Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell investigates the social consequences of five major disasters: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; the gargantuan 1917 explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the devastating 1985 Mexico City quake; Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 deluge of New Orleans. Each case study provides a thick description of what surviving residents themselves understand to be a temporary utopian society naturally arising in the midst of casualties, disorientation, homelessness, and great loss of all kinds. Solnit tells many poignant stories of altruism, courage, and compassionate social action. In 1906 San Francisco, for example, we meet Amelia Hoshouser, a middle-class woman who fed thousands of people in her makeshift “Mizpah Café,” while throughout the city soup kitchens, shelters, and relief projects emerged from collective human spirit as if spontaneously from the ruins. The quake…