Disasters hang over us day in, day out. Hurricane Katrina, Chernobyl, space shuttle crashes and nationwide bankruptcies; misfortunes one and all, but accidents? Marc Gerstein doesn't think so.
Flirting With Disaster does what Blink did for intuition and Freakonomics for microeconomics, prying our eyes open to the reality of a complex and crucial topic. While most disaster investigations ask "what happened?", here Gerstein asks "how?" and "why?". Phenomena like 'bystander behaviour' (we're all culprits) and the 'butterfly effect' are couched amidst case studies of catastrophes that could've been averted: the Iraq War, Enron and the current sub-prime lending crash. Accident or design? Find out.