About this Item
Missing dust jacket; Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.05. Seller Inventory # G0226108597I5N01
Bibliographic Details
Title: Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the ...
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Fair
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
About this title
There are those who say we shouldn’t worry about things that are unlikely to happen. That’s what your pilot means by saying, after a turbulent cross country flight, "you’ve just completed the safest part of your trip." We hear the same thing when officials tell us that the probability of a nuclear power plant melting down is vanishingly small. Or that the likelihood of an asteroid striking the earth is one in a million, billion, or trillion. Chance is in our favor.
In fact, chance is often not in our favor. Disaster and failure are indeed normal, and as a colleague of mine puts it, things that have never happened before happen all the time. A fair number of those things end up being events we call worst cases. When that happens we’re given opportunities to learn things about society, and human nature, that are usually obscured.
Thomas Hardy said that "...if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst." In this book I look at the Worst full in the face. What I see is frightening, but also enlightening. I hold, tenuously, to the idea that knowing a thing permits comfort with that thing. Sometimes the comfort comes from greater control. Sometimes it comes just from knowing the enemy, or the scary thing, which proffers a way forward, toward more safety. There is horror in disaster. But there is much more too, for we can use calamity to glean wisdom, even hope. Just as Hardy said.
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