Thread by @doctorow

I was profoundly moved by Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell" - a beautifully written, lavishly researched book about the history of disasters documenting how everyday people pull together to help one another.

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a…

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Solnit documents the flipside of this, the "elite panic" among the wealthy who are blind to the cooperation of working people and convinced that the poors are coming to get them. Elite panic is firmly entrenched in our cultural narratives, a commonplace in books and films.

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It was something I tried to remedy in my 2017 novel Walkaway, which makes a villain out of elite panic itself -- not the thing that the elites are panicking about.

craphound.com/tags/walkaway

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It's a contrast with books like Lord of the Flies, a book that represents a variant on a cozy catastrophe: "a bizarre calamity wipes out a large percentage of the population, but the protagonists survive and thrive in the new world that follows."

pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/gri…

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In @rcbregman's new book, "Humankind, a Hopeful History," he documents a real-life Lord of the Flies, where a group of Australian schoolboys were stranded on a remote Tongan atoll for 15 months, cooperating and caring for one another.

publishersweekly.com/978-0-316-4185…

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The boys' tale is excerpted in The @Guardian today, and it's a lovely antidote to the lazy story of humanity's bestial nature, lurking eternally just below the surface.

theguardian.com/books/2020/may…

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"By the time we arrived, the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination."

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"The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer."

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"Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits."

eof/