One of my favorite books, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why.

I love this book because author Amanda Ripley challenges our assumptions about how we’d react in an emergency – illustrating her points with a poetic balance of moving personal survival stories and cold, hard research. I like to call her “the Malcolm Gladwell of disaster writing” because this book provokes “ah ha!” moments about human behavior in the same way as Gladwell’s The Tipping Point or Blink.

Check out just this one little excerpt from the book in which Elia Zedeño – a survivor of both the 1993 and September, 2001 World Trade Center disasters – prompts Ripley to investigate why people hesitate. 

You can preview a few more pages (less fuzzy copies) on Amazon before you decide to toss down a mere $10 for one of the best preparedness resources you’ll ever own.