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Worst Cases: Terror & Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination
Lee Clarke
A timely and necessary look into how we think about the unthinkable, Worst Cases will be must reading for anyone attuned to our current climate of threat and fear.
University Of Chicago Press
November 2005
200 pages ISBN: 0226108597 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Al Qaeda detonates a nuclear weapon in Times Square during
rush hour, wiping out half of Manhattan and killing 500,000
people. A virulent strain of bird flu jumps to humans in
Thailand, sweeps across Asia, and claims more than fifty
million lives. A single freight car of chlorine derails on
the outskirts of Los Angeles, spilling its contents and
killing seven million. An asteroid ten kilometers wide
slams into the Atlantic Ocean, unleashing a tsunami that
renders life on the planet as we know it extinct. We consider the few who live in fear of such scenarios to
be alarmist or even paranoid. But Worst Cases shows that
such individuals—like Cassandra foreseeing the fall of Troy—
are more reasonable and prescient than you might think. In
this book, Lee Clarke surveys the full range of possible
catastrophes that animate and dominate the popular
imagination, from toxic spills and terrorism to plane
crashes and pandemics. Along the way, he explores how the
ubiquity of worst cases in everyday life has rendered them
ordinary and mundane: very real threats like a killer flu
or an American Hiroshima have become so common that they
have lost their ability to shock us. Fear and dread, Clarke
argues, have actually become too rare: only when the public
has more substantial information and more credible warnings
will it take worst cases as seriously as it should.
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