The Unthinkable

Roughly 90 percent of Americans live somewhere exposed to earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorism or other disasters. Some of them will one day have to make a split-second choice to save themselves and their families. This book asks how people actually behave when that moment comes, and whether upbringing, gender or personality count for anything.

Amanda Ripley, a journalist at Time magazine who has covered major disasters, works through the question as narrative investigative non-fiction. She retraces how people responded to the 1917 explosion of the Mont Blanc munitions ship and a 1985 plane crash in England that left investigators baffled for years. She also follows the escape of 15,000 people from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

To explain what happened in those events, she turns to brain scientists, trauma psychologists and other disaster experts. They include a Holocaust survivor who studies heroism and a master gunfighter who learned to overcome extreme fear. Ripley also puts herself through the experience. Military researchers examine her brain, and she goes through realistic simulations of a plane crash into the ocean and a raging fire.

Her findings cover the behavior of crowds, the workings of the brain's fear circuits and the weakness of many evolved reactions. She also finds that the brain can perform far better with modest preparation. The tone is steady and practical, written for general readers who want to know how they might act.