"A very smart book about risk and disaster and, more importantly, the larger contexts in which those things are defined as such. I found this book more interesting than nearly all the sociology I've read in the past five or ten years. This is timely and will be one of those books that floats into and out of relevance. COVID isn't gone; it'll come back. And there will be other attacks like it. Climate change is, so smart people say, responsible for everything from your state burning up to my hangnail. Whether something is actually done about the state burning up will depend precisely on the kinds of points Beamish makes."--Lee Clarke, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Rutgers University
