The Unthinkable - Amanda Ripley

I have always been interested in reading about disasters. Books about outbreaks and explosions, bombings and plane crashes catch my attention. When I was a kid I cherished a copy of ‘Flight #116 is Down’ by Caroline B. Cooney. The story of a plane crashing on the estate of a teenage girl and how she (and the others in the crash) survive. As any girl, I was entranced by a book that had a heroine and of course there was a bit of a love story thrown in between Heidi and Patrick, the 17 year old EMS guy (…maybe he was a trainee?). But the real appeal to me was the  plane crash and how people solve and survive a problem that big. One of the scenes I remember most from the book was when they tore out the holly bushes. With the massive amount of vehicles that needed to get access to the plane on Heidi’s estate there just wasn’t enough room in the normal driveway. Someone (and it may have been Heidi herself) makes the decision to rip out the holly bushes to give access to ambulances. It’s a pragmatic decision, but the part that sticks with me is Heidi thinking about how everyone gets Christmas holly from those bushes and how that will change now. A plane has crashed into her backyard, her home is being used as triage and it seems like the entire world is showing up on her front lawn and yet her mind drifts off to Christmas decorations. That one instance, where the minutiae of daily life seemed to overshadow the current crisis, has always intrigued me. Just how do our brains cope in a situation like that? How do we think when our bodies are focused on just surviving?

In Amanda Ripley’s book “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why”, she attempts to explain answers to those questions. Rehashing several  current disasters through the use of interviews and articles, she combines the personal experience of survivors with scientific research to explain what happens to us during a disaster. Over the course of the book she explores both the physical and psychological changes to the body and mind that occur during situations where our lives are threatened. The ‘disasters’ mentioned in the book range from grocery store shoot-outs to Hurricane Katrina and of course, 9/11.

At times, this book falters, not sure if can be the self-help book it attempts to emulate, wanting to give us steps to follow but never quite staying in that genre. Which is understandable, considering the fact that while you can adequately teach someone to the steps to bake a cake in a book, there can be no easy 1-2-3 of surviving a plane crash or terrorist attack. Instead the book becomes a mixture of information and anecdotes, all told with just enough sensationalism to keep the reader interested and just enough information and facts to keep from being frivolous. Ripley, a magazine reporter for Time, has a unique style that reminds me more of blogs than books. She varies between strictly clinical explanations and personal reflections easily, creating a rapport with the audience that takes what could have been a literary version of rubbernecking at an accident site and turns it into a journey toward preparedness. Remarking how cool she thought it was to wear fireman suspenders or sharing three years worth of meetings with one World Trade Center survivor, Ripley humanizes what could be an otherwise voyeuristic topic.

The Unthinkable isn’t like a manual for surviving disasters. This is not the plane crash version of Gavin de Becker’s “The Gift of Fear” and shouldn’t be treated that way. Ripley herself states that while she has explored types of responses, that no disaster is the same and people won’t respond the same. In reading this book you feel that the key to surviving a disaster is less in learning certain skill sets and more in learning about yourself. That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t adapt a few proactive behaviors like learning about evacuation plans for the buildings you’re in, listening to safety instructions on the plane and even just paying attention to your surroundings. But the real point that Ripley stresses in The Unthinkable is that we will react differently in a disaster than we do in our regular life. Those reactions may or may not be something that we can change with prior knowledge, but self-examination, proactive behavior and just the awareness of certain reactions could potentially save our lives someday.