Skip to main content

Catastrophes! – David Prothero ****

There is something interesting about the capacity of words on a page to transport you to another time and place, to evoke such strong emotions, and to draw you in completely and make you forget about what’s going on around you.
This is what happens on many occasions throughout this book with the dramatic eye-witness accounts of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and other natural disasters. We relive from the perspective of those who were there at the time some of the worst natural disasters ever to have hit us. These accounts are powerful and harrowing, and it’s impossible not to become fully immersed in them.
Possibly the most powerful account is that of Charles Davy, living in Lisbon during the 1755 earthquake that destroyed the city. It is difficult to imagine what it must have been like to witness such a huge amount of destruction and chaos among those living in the city at the time. As in some of the other events that we look at in the book, it’s the death tolls that are most shocking. Between 60,000 and 100,000 people died in the 1755 Lisbon quake (with tens of thousands beyond the city also losing their lives). In the Indian Ocean tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004, the figure was 250,000, with millions also misplaced. It’s difficult to get your head around these numbers.
Each kind of extreme geologic or weather event – we also look at landslides, floods and volcano eruptions, among others – is given a chapter of its own in the book. In each chapter, after reading accounts of specific disasters, we go on to look in some detail at the science behind the phenomena, and touch on issues around predicting disasters and planning for them. The horrific accounts of particular disasters really make you want to read these sections to understand their physical causes, and they emphasise how important it is we are well-prepared for future disasters.
One theme running through the book is our powerlessness in the face of these extreme events. Prediction is difficult and sometimes impossible, author Donald Prothero explains (and this is something the book rightly argues the public need to appreciate to a greater extent). As for planning for disasters, there seem to be two big issues. Firstly, where good planning is possible, sometimes governments have been unwilling to take the necessary steps to protect their citizens. Second, even where we do try to mitigate the effects of disasters, the measures we choose are often counter-productive – levees, for example, may contain flooding in a particular region but they often concentrate flooding downstream.
As a combination of dramatic, personal accounts of recent and historic catastrophes, the science behind these disasters, and other surrounding issues, this is probably as good an introduction to natural disasters as you’re likely to find. You’ll be left with a good appreciation of the causes of these extreme events and of the power of nature and, perhaps most importantly, an understanding of the impact these catastrophes can have on human beings.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Matt Chorley
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more