Montano is an expert on the intersectionality of disasters, climate change and media. But the power of this debut book lies not so much in her mastery of statistics or research as in her eloquent, passionately personal narrative ... Montano’s book is at once a comparative compendium of crises and a prescriptive take on how to face a future threatened by the overarching complexities of climate change and the certainty of uncertainty, whether pandemic-driven or endemic to sociopolitical structures ... While the measured, richly descriptive writing that propels much of the book lapses into progressive rhetoric by the end, Montano asks all the right questions.
Montano debuts with a compelling account of her career ... Linking climate change to the increasingly destructive natural disasters facing the nation, Montano's part-memoir, part-analysis book is an urgent call to take action.
It’s hardly news that the Covid-19 pandemic was handled poorly, but Montano contributes more disheartening details. Most books on disaster end with hope, but the author will have none of it. She exhorts readers to take action but doesn’t claim to see light at the end of the tunnel. Painful but essential reading.
... a trenchant if uneven look at communities that are fighting for survival in the face of climate change ... Her indignation is paired with comprehensive research, but the narrative often gets bogged down in repetitively cataloging the author’s experiences in, among other places, Louisiana, coastal Maine, and Texas—so much so that the disaster victims themselves feel conspicuously absent. Despite these missing voices, this is a great primer on the deficiencies of the country’s crisis response apparatus.
