Exploring human responses to a series of urban disasters through first-hand accounts and the research of disaster sociologists, Solnit weaves a story of human nature of neighborly help and camaraderie. Disaster planning by those in charge still largely assumes (as Solnit recounts in Hurricane Katrina's story most painfully) that the masses become beastly selfish mobs who must be controlled, and yet it seems instead it is the elite whose hierarchy is upturned by disaster who panic, and through whose often militarized or else distracted control of power who kill and destroy the self-support systems that arise out of love for your suddenly equal neighbor when the individual disasters of everyday life are replaced by a shared calamity.