Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender and the Sociology of Disasters

Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender and the Sociology of Disasters, edited by Walter Gillis Peacock, Betty Hearn Morrow, and Hugh Gladwin. New York & London: Routledge, 1997. 277 pp. $110.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-41516811-2.

In my 30 years of reading disaster case studies, this is by far the best! Peacock, Morrow, and Gladwin have done a superb job weaving together the findings of nine separate research projects (three NSF-funded) into an engaging examination of how race, ethnicity, class, and gender interact in a disaster context. The heterogeneity of race and ethnicity associated with South Florida's Greater Miami-Dade County area sets the context for how the dynamics of social inequality were played out in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. Working over three years, research teams for the various projects were comprised mainly of faculty and graduate students from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Florida International University, many of whom were victims of Hurricane Andrew. The quantitative and qualitative methodologies gives a nice blend of analytical descriptive accounts together with logistic regression models. For those readers unfamiliar with...