{"product_id":"the-unthinkable-isbn-9780307352903","title":"The Unthinkable","description":"Discover how human beings react to danger–and what makes the difference between life and death\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday, nine out of ten Americans live in places at significant risk of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorism, or other disasters. Tomorrow, some of us will have to make split-second choices to save ourselves and our families. How will we react? What will it feel like? Will we be heroes or victims? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her quest to answer these questions, award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley traces human responses to some of recent history’s epic disasters, from the explosion of the Mont Blanc munitions ship in 1917–one of the biggest explosions before the invention of the atomic bomb–to the journeys of the 15,000 people who found their way out of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. To understand the science behind the stories, Ripley turns to leading brain scientists, trauma psychologists, and other disaster experts. She even has her own brain examined by military researchers and experiences, through realistic simulations, what it might be like to survive a plane crash into the ocean or to escape a raging fire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRipley comes back with precious wisdom about the surprising humanity of crowds, the elegance of the brain’s fear circuits, and the stunning inadequacy of many of our evolutionary responses. Most unexpectedly, she discovers the brain’s ability to do much, much better–with just a little help.“Fascinating and useful.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A must read. We need books like this to help us understand the world in which we live.”\u003cb\u003e—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author \u003ci\u003eThe Black Swan\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eFooled by Randomness\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Engrossing and lucid . . . facing the truth about the human capacity for risk and disaster turns out to be a lot less scary than staying in the dark.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eO: The Oprah Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Unthinkable\u003c\/i\u003e isn’t merely a book about disaster; it’s a book about survival—maybe yours.”\u003cb\u003e—Gavin de Becker, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Gift of Fear\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e“Ripley is a voyeur on a mission. . . . Her conviction:  We’d all stand a better chance of surviving a disaster if we understood what happens  to our little gray cells when things get ugly. . . . Spiced with surprising factoids,  this book might save your life one day.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBloomberg News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is a book with a purpose, meant to change things.”\u003cb\u003e—Rob Hardy, \u003ci\u003eThe Commercial Dispatch\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “These  tales leave your viscera enflamed because they compel two questions: ‘What would  it feel like to go through that?’ and ‘Would I do the right thing and survive?’ This  is an irresistible book.”\u003cb\u003e—Robert M. Sapolsky, author of \u003ci\u003eDetermined\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Unthinkable\u003c\/i\u003e is the most magnificent account of a survivor’s mind  that I have ever read.  It has helped me know and accept some of my reactions during  my seventy-two-day ordeal in the Andes. I can now understand how fear motivated me, and how  denial also played a part. This book will help those who’ve never faced disaster  to understand their own behavior and be prepared should their luck run out one day.”\u003cb\u003e—Nando Parrado, author of \u003ci\u003eMiracle in the Andes\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Unthinkable\u003c\/i\u003e reveals why, under the same circumstances, some people caught up in a disaster survive  and others do not. In her  well-crafted prose, Amanda Ripley shows us all how to prepare to meet danger and increase  our chances of surviving the unthinkable.”\u003cb\u003e—Bruce Henderson, author of \u003ci\u003eDown to the Sea \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eTrue North\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “When a disaster occurs we invariably learn  the ‘what’ of the event—how many died, how many survived. Amanda Ripley’s riveting  \u003ci\u003eThe Unthinkable\u003c\/i\u003e provides genuine insight into the ‘why’ behind the numbers. This  remarkable book will not only change your life, it could very well save it.”\u003cb\u003e—Gregg  Olsen, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption  in America’s Richest Silver Mine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Ever fantasize about what you would do in a disaster?  How would you survive? How would you behave? After interviewing survivors of the  World Trade Center attack, Amanda Ripley sifted through amazing tales of survivors  from other disasters and mined various sociological, psychological, and neurological  studies. Her insights are absolutely fascinating, and they could come in handy one  day.”\u003cb\u003e—Walter Isaacson, author of \u003ci\u003eElon Musk\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eAMANDA RIPLEY is a senior writer for \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e magazine.\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Delay: Procrastinating in Tower 1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e On February 26, 1993, when terrorists  attacked the World Trade Center for the first time, Elia Zedeno was in an express  elevator carrying a slice of Sbarro's pizza. She had taken a new temporary worker  to the food court to show him around, and they were on their way back to their desks.  When the bomb exploded, they heard a loud pop and the elevator stopped and began  to descend. Then it stopped for good, trapping her and five other people. Smoke began  to slowly coil in from below. Two men grappled with the door. A woman dropped to  her knees and started praying, making Zedeno nervous. Then one of the men calmly  directed everyone to get low and cover their faces. They all did as they were told.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Zedeno concentrated on keeping her breathing shallow and slow. But the more she  tried to calm down, the harder her heart seemed to pound. Then they heard a man screaming  in the elevator next to them. \"I'm burning up!\" he yelled as he banged on the metal  box around him. But soon he was quiet. \"I remember thinking, 'We're going to be next,'\"  Zedeno says. She visualized rescue workers finding them dead inside the elevator  later. Just then, she thought she would lunge for the doors and start banging herself.  But before she could, the temp had started doing it for her. He was screaming and  banging. So Zedeno took charge of quieting him down. \"Robert, calm down. You're going  to inhale too much smoke,\" she told him. He started to cough and returned to the  floor. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was around then that Zedeno was filled with a wave of peace, inexplicably.  \"Regardless of the outcome, I knew everything was going to be OK,\" she remembers.  \"My breath became effortless. My mind no longer wandered. Suddenly, I wasn't there  anymore. I was just watching. I could see the people lying in the elevator. The sounds  were far away, and I was just hovering. I had no emotions.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When they'd been in  the elevator for about an hour, a firefighter managed to rip open the door and pull  them out. It turned out the car had returned to the lobby level, and that's where  they'd been all along. Zedeno could not see the face of the firefighter who pulled  her out; the smoke was too thick. She did as he instructed, grabbing onto a rope  and following it out through the lobby and out the doors. She was stunned by the  darkness in the lobby and the emptiness outside. She thought that once she had made  it out of her own private catastrophe, everything would be normal, bustling and bright.  She never imagined that a place could look so different.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In the basement below,  a Ryder truck full of eleven hundred pounds of explosives had left a crater five  stories deep. Six people had died. It was the largest full-building evacuation in  U.S. history, and nothing had gone the way it was supposed to go. Smoke purled up  the stairways. The power failed, rendering the emergency communications system useless  and the stairways dark. People moved extraordinarily slowly. Ten hours after the  explosion, firefighters were still finding people who had not yet evacuated in their  offices. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e After the bombing, glow-in-the-dark tape and backup power generators were  installed in the Trade Center. Both helped save lives eight years later. But still  no one fully answered the fundamental question: why did people move so slowly? And  what did it mean about all of our assumptions about skyscrapers—and the Trade Center  in particular? The 1993 bombing became a story about terrorism, as would the attacks  on the same buildings eight years later, and rightly so. But they were also stories  of procrastination and denial, the first phase of the human disaster experience.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A few days later, Zedeno was right back at work in a neighboring building. One  month later, her office reopened on the seventy-third floor of Tower 1. She started  riding the same elevator to work. But it was months before she could get the taste  of soot out of her mouth. She thought about leaving the towers, but not with any  conviction. \"I remember saying, 'This could happen again.' And someone said, 'Lightning  never strikes twice.'\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\"Don't Worry. It's in Your Head!\"\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Zedeno has a small stature,  round glasses, and Dizzy Gillespie cheeks when she smiles, which happens often. She  came to America with her family from Cuba when she was eleven. Her parents had spent  her entire childhood plotting to get away from Fidel Castro. When they finally got  permission to leave in the early 1970s, they moved to West New York, New Jersey,  where their daughter could see the brand-new Trade Center Towers sunning themselves  almost everywhere she went. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When she was nineteen, Zedeno visited the Trade Center  for the first time. She came to apply for a secretarial job with the Port Authority  of New York\/New Jersey. She had no idea what the Port Authority did—or even that  it owned the Trade Center—but a girlfriend convinced her to fill out the application.  When she returned for her second interview, her mother came with her. The boss hired  her on the spot, and, on her lunch break, Zedeno ran to the plaza to tell her mother.  \"What will you do?\" she asked her mother, who had no idea how to get home to New  Jersey. \"I will sit right here and wait for you,\" her mother announced. They took  the train home together that evening. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Eventually, Zedeno got promoted to the finance  section. Her office had regular fire drills, which consisted of gathering in the  hallway to gossip. During a blackout in 1990, she and her office mates walked down  the tower's stairs. That's how they learned that homeless people had been using the  lower stairwells as bathrooms. \"We were laughing and talking,\" she remembers. When  Zedeno talks, her voice goes up at the end of her sentences, like a child telling  you something outrageous. \"The whole thing was a joke!\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Zedeno is a witness wherever  she goes. She remembers life in surround-sound detail. When I ask her what it was  like to leave Cuba as a little girl, she tells me about the day she left in April  of 1971. Her mother was doing her hair when they heard the sound of a motorcycle.  \"Only one man in town had a motorcycle, and it didn't sound like that,\" she says.  Suddenly, the sound stopped in front of their house. A soldier walked in the front  door without knocking and told them to leave. Zedeno knew this was good news: they  had finally won permission to go to America. Fifteen minutes later, they left their  house forever. They were terrified the whole journey out, but they made it. When  they arrived in Miami, Zedeno ran down the aisles of a supermarket yelling out descriptions  of everything she saw. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e By September 2001, Zedeno had worked in the towers for over  twenty-one years. She was forty-one years old, and she managed five employees on  the seventy-third floor of Tower 1. Her group oversaw the Port Authority's engineering  consultants. On 9\/11, Zedeno got to work a little after 8:00 A.M. She settled into  her cubicle and listened to her voice-mail messages. In an hour, she would head up  to the cafeteria to get some breakfast, as usual. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The Trade Center did not feel  like a cluster of seven buildings; it felt like a city. Every day, fifty thousand  people came to work there, and another two hundred thousand passed through. The plaza  underneath held the largest shopping mall in Lower Manhattan. \"You didn't need to  leave for anything,\" Zedeno says. The complex had 103 elevators—and its own zip  code (10048). Bomb threats and small fires were not uncommon. The engine company  across the street sometimes got called to the Trade Center eight times a day. Zedeno  got used to seeing firefighters in the elevators. Days later, she would hear that  there had been smoke somewhere in the building. It might have been two football fields  away from her. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e At 8:46 A.M., an American Airlines Boeing 767 traveling 490 mph  struck the building eleven floors above her. When the plane hit Zedeno's building,  the effect was not subtle. It obliterated four floors immediately. From her desk,  Zedeno heard a booming explosion and felt the building lurch to the south, as if  it might topple. It had never done that before, not even in 1993. This time, she  grabbed her desk and held on, lifting her feet off the floor. \"I actually expected  the ceiling to fall and the building to cave in,\" she remembers. At the time, she  screamed, \"What's happening?\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Talking about it now, in a deli across from the void  where the towers once stood, Zedeno wonders why she didn't immediately run for the  stairs. She'd been through this before, after all. But what she really wanted, quite  desperately, was for someone to answer back: \"Everything is OK! Don't worry. It's  in your head!\" At the moment of impact, Zedeno had entered a rarefied zone. The rules  of normal life were suspended. Her entire body and mind changed. She would wind her  way through a series of phases along the survival arc. First would be a thicket of  disbelief, followed by frantic deliberation, and, finally, action. We will witness  all three here, but more than anything else, Zedeno's story is one of denial. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Zedeno  has revisited the moments of her escape from the Trade Center until they are worn  and familiar. She now gives tours of Ground Zero to tourists from around the world.  But still there are riddles she cannot decipher, behavioral glitches that don't make  obvious sense. More than anything else, she is mystified by how slow she was to accept  what was happening all day long.","brand":"Harmony","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304060440805,"sku":"NP9780307352903","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307352903.jpg?v=1757964792","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-unthinkable-isbn-9780307352903","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}