Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America / Edition 2

by Ted Steinberg

Overview

As the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain began to pour into New Orleans, people began asking the big question--could any of this have been avoided? How much of the damage from Hurricane Katrina was bad luck, and how much was poor city planning?

Steinberg's Acts of God is a provocative history of natural disasters in the United States. This revised edition features a new chapter analyzing the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, a disaster Steinberg warned could happen when the book first was published. Focusing on America's worst natural disasters, Steinberg argues that it is wrong to see these tragedies as random outbursts of nature's violence or expressions of divine judgment. He reveals how the decisions of business leaders and government officials have paved the way for the greater losses of life and property, especially among those least able to withstand such blows--America's poor, elderly, and minorities. Seeing nature or God as the primary culprit, Steinberg explains, has helped to hide the fact that some Americans are simply better able to protect themselves from the violence of nature than others.

In the face of revelations about how the federal government mishandled the Katrina calamity, this book is a must-read before further wind and water sweep away more lives. Acts of God is a call to action that needs desperately to be heard.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195309683
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/20/2006
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Lexile:	1540L (what's this?)

About the Author

Ted Steinberg teaches history at Case Western Reserve University and is the author of Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History and American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn. His essays have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Natural History, and The New York Times.

Editorial Reviews

"Powerfully argued and forcefully written.... Good old-fashioned, hard-headed scholarship, which confirms that some of the most savage critics of capitalism in US academia today are environmental historians.... Acts of God is the perfect book, in fact, to curl up with during the perfect storm."—Times Literary Supplement

"This compelling book blows away many obscuring clouds of misunderstanding and denial in our national environmental memory. Steinberg forcefully argues that what we have called "natural disasters" have really been acts of social and economic injustice committed by government and private enterprise. He combines superb research with mordant wit and moral bite." —Donald Worster, author of Dust Bowl:The Southern Plains In the 1930's (winner of the Bancroft Prize in 1980), The Wealth Of Nature, and the forthcoming A River Running West: The Life Of John Wesley Powell.

"Powerfully argued and forcefully written.... Good old-fashioned, hard-headed scholarship, which confirms that some of the most savage critics of capitalism in US academia today are environmental historians.... Acts of God is the perfect book, in fact, to curl up with during the perfect storm."—Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher