In her fascinating study, The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do about Them), seismologist Lucy Jones examines 11 of history’s most destructive natural events, from the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and the floods in Sacramento in 1861-1862 to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 and the great 1927 flood in Mississippi, to reveal what we can learn from them ... Jones’ fascinating book takes a long view at natural events in order to help us understand our environment and to prepare for and survive natural disasters.

In her book, and after a lifetime studying the seismicity of Southern California, Jones appears to take much the same view, stoically. She reminds us, in sober terms, that the forces that bring us earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis and cyclones (and that also help form dramatic scenery and climate, of kinds among which we generally like to live) are also capable of bringing down more wrath and destruction than can ever be withstood ... It is a little disappointing to read that Jones has only the most anodyne and predictable of suggestions for dealing with all this impending doom — we must educate ourselves, build better and more resilient buildings, ape the Japanese, get our kids to drill, engage with local leaders, don’t assume the government will be much help (As if. See Michael Brown).

Her new book The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them) shares Jones' unlikely combination of realism and optimism ... To prevent disaster, we'll need to confront that reality. In The Big Ones, Jones presents the history of natural disasters as the history of ourselves; looking back as a way to look forward.

In the interests of scholarly sobriety, Jones painted a conservative picture – the better to get practical minds thinking along practical lines. Her hypothetical event involved only a portion of the San Andreas Fault, and it involved the imagining of countless fires and many broken bridges and roads, the interruption of vital services and the medical infrastructure ... The book’s ambit widens to include other disasters in addition to earthquakes ... And as is made clear over and over in The Big Ones, major earthquakes bring two equally devastating calamities in their wake: aftershocks, which can often be powerful earthquakes in their own right, and tsunamis, massive walls of water triggered by seismic upheavals. In ordinary waves, the most active part of the water is the very crest; in tsunamis, the entire mass of the water is moving, often at incredible speeds. This is a major threat for two main reasons: first, an enormous proportion of humanity is vulnerable – cities, farmlands, and, infamously, nuclear power plants, stand on floodplains all over the world – and second, the vast majority of those vulnerable buildings and cities have little in the way of resilient architecture, thoughtful alternative energy and medical services, or evacuation-savvy inhabitants. 'Knowledge of tsunamis has never been more prevalent,' Jones writes, 'the word tsunami means considerably more to us than it did even twenty years ago.'

For three decades, seismologist Lucy Jones soothed the nerves of quake-rattled Californians with her calm explanations and common-sense preparedness tips. Her frequent media appearances, including some with her toddler cradled on her hip, earned her a level of celebrity unprecedented among earthquake scientists since Charles Richter lent his name to the first earthquake scale. 'She’s been called the Beyoncé of earthquakes, the Meryl Streep of government service, a woman breaking barriers in a man’s world,' the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2016 when Jones retired from the U.S. Geological Survey ... She helped create a gripping earthquake scenario to spell out what’s at stake and worked with politicians, building owners and affordable-housing advocates to push through the nation’s most aggressive seismic regulations requiring upgrades to dangerous buildings and other infrastructure.

There’s a good book waiting to be written entirely on such a scenario, something along the lines of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007), but Jones moves on to less fruitful ground in examining the effects of other 'big ones' on human civilization. Her take on Pompeii, for instance, is a little thin, and her speculation that natural disaster divides the blame-the-gods attitude of the Romans from the blame-the-humans attitude of the Jews again needs a book all its own. Much better is the author’s account of the catastrophic effect of the devastating Tangshan earthquake of 1976 ... Uneven, but of interest to readers with a bent for natural disaster—and to those keen on surviving it.

Jones gives readers hope, though, describing what has been learned from each cataclysmic event and, in her final chapter, outlining ways that future catastrophes can be mitigated. This work could prove beneficial to all who live in an area prone to natural disasters, which is just about everyone.