I really liked the perspective of this book and found it interesting to finally hear a different narrative about how people respond to disasters. The few bad apples theory of violence and crime is probably pretty accurate, so it's nice to have someone presenting a counter-argument.

Only two things kept me from reviewing this more favorably; The first is that the book tends to go off the rails at times into examples that are only tangentially related to the thesis, but seem to reinforce the author's own worldview and politics. The section on Hurricane Katrina in particular went much too far away from the story of Katrina and into the policies and practices of the Bush Administration without much explanation for the divergence except that the author seemed to clearly dislike them.

The second thing is that the stories feel a bit cherry-picked. I buy into the author's argument, that there is far more good going on in the wake of a disaster than bad, but the evidence she presents feels very anecdotal and isn't backed up in any way aside from stories of the afflicted. It's redoubtably hard to gather empirical or quantitative evidence of good being done in a disaster site, but more discussion of this could have strengthened the book considerably.