The best books about American disasters

Back when people understood hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters as literally being "acts of God," they sensibly concluded that human intervention could not prevent them. Yet that language—and its wide-ranging implications for public policy—has persisted, even as scientists have come to understand the physical causes of disasters and, increasingly, to believe that no disaster is wholly "natural." Ted Steinberg shows how government and corporate leaders' perpetuation of the idea of disasters as "natural" or even divinely ordained helps them to evade responsibility and avoid meaningful policy changes that might prevent future catastrophes. (Ripped from the headlines, climate change denial is a prime example!) Gripping case studies of famous disasters like the Chicago Fire and the San Francisco earthquake make this serious book a compelling read.

The subtitle pretty much says it all: poorly paid workers locked inside an appallingly under-regulated chicken processing plant pay with their lives when the building caught fire so that we can all have cheap chicken nuggets. The fact that this horrific fire in Hamlet, North Carolina, happened fairly recently—in 1991—makes Bryant Simon's well-told story all the more troubling and tragic.

Christopher Morris's chronological scope is break-taking, and not all five hundred years of his story deal directly with the hurricanes and other disasters that have routinely afflicted the Lower Mississippi River region. The Big Muddy describes the interplay between humans and the environment, and especially human efforts to engineer the boundaries between wetlands and dry agricultural acreage (first for rice, and later for cotton). After more than a century of hubris-laden and profit-driven tinkering, the Katrina disaster was more or less inevitable—and very much in keeping with the region's tradition of inequitably sharing both the short-term benefits and long-term costs of environmental disruption.

I am a historian of early America, including the American Revolution, though I'm not a huge reader (or writer) of conventional military history. Published in 2001, Elizabeth Fenn's book was in many ways ahead of its time in emphasizing how military outcomes—and strategies—were often contingent on other seemingly unrelated factors. In this case, she argues that smallpox was a decisive force in the American War for Independence. The continental scope of her study, moreover, provides a link between that war and the ultimately successful military offensives that the independent United States inflicted on disease-weakened Native American peoples in the post-revolutionary era.

Zeitoun reads like a novel, but it's not. Dave Eggers tells the true story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his family in New Orleans after Katrina. Known simply as "Zeitoun," Abdulrahman is a Syrian-born American citizen; his wife, Kathy, is a white Louisianan who converted to Islam before meeting her future husband. Zeitoun stayed in New Orleans after the storm, rescuing neighbors and bringing them supplies, until the authorities mistakenly arrested him as a potential terrorist. In this book, the Zeitouns and other ordinary New Orleans residents are the heroes; the villains are the police and especially the feds (FEMA and the National Guard). Several years after the publication of Eggers's book, Zeitoun was charged with assaulting his wife and the couple eventually divorced. Did the irreparable material and psychological costs of Katrina wreck the Zeitoun family? Knowing what happened next should lead us to ponder the long-term human effects of hurricanes and other disasters.