This intriguing book explores the emergence of disaster as a political concept. Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Slovoj Žižek, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, Huet offers readers a panoramic survey of disaster in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ending with a discussion of the impact of the culture of disaster on filmmaking. The geographic foci are Europe and North America. Huet's main concern is to understand how efforts to make sense of disaster have structured thinking in the post-Enlightenment period.

Huet understandably places a lot of emphasis on developments during the Enlightenment. Her discussion of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake is instructive. The calamity is commonly taken to be the first so-called modern disaster. By this it is typically meant that instead of interpreting the catastrophe within a theological framework some thinkers began to see this kind of event through the lens of science and reason. Huet, however, taking her cue from the Frankfurt school, argues instead that the meaning of the Lisbon disaster exists elsewhere. The Enlightenment conferred a legacy founded on the control of nature. This is the principle that disasters such as Lisbon challenged, in effect revealing that complete mastery of the natural world was illusory. Moreover, Huet contends that the Enlightenment did not just extinguish supernatural explanations; it dealt a substantive blow to “the idea of a purely natural disaster” (p. 9) and led instead to the rise of the idea of “human-engineered calamity” (2).

This is a wide-ranging book. Huet discusses topics ranging from the 1720 plague in Marseilles, to the 1832 cholera epidemic, to Rousseau's work (which formed the basis, she argues, for a kind of disaster identity), to nineteenth-century shipwrecks like the French frigate Medusa, to films such as Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up. To say that Huet covers a lot of ground is an understatement.

There are, of course, risks in adopting such a broad approach to a subject as sweeping as calamity. The principal downside is that there will be insufficient intellectual glue—an overarching argument—to hold the book together. Huet's study may suffer somewhat from this flaw, but the risks of such a wide angle are worth it, in my view, because it counters the current tendency to tear disasters out of context and fashion them as unpredictable, spectacular events, the kind of pulp nonfiction that trade publishers cannot get enough of. In this respect, Huet's book fits nicely on the shelf beside Kevin Rozario's The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), a book that, oddly, Huet does not mention, at least so far as I could find.

The idea of disasters as politicized phenomena is hardly novel. But Huet is most certainly onto something when she writes that calamity has become a kind of mode of thought. Western culture, as she puts it, does seem to be in a “state of emergency” (2). Though Huet has not completely solved the riddle of how this tumultuous state came to be, she certainly has made a valiant attempt at coming to grips with it.