In Be Very Afraid, Robert Wuthnow examines the human response to existential threats--once a matter for theology, but now looming before us in multiple forms. Nuclear weapons, pandemics, global warming: each threatens to destroy the planet, or at least to annihilate our species. Freud, he notes, famously taught that the standard psychological response to an overwhelming danger is denial. In fact, Wuthnow writes, the opposite is true: we seek ways of positively meeting the threat, of doing something--anything--even if it's wasteful and time-consuming. It would be one thing if our responses were merely pointless, he observes, but they can actually be harmful. Both the public and policymakers tend to model reactions to grave threats on how we met previous ones. Offering insight into our responses to everything from An Inconvenient Truth to the bird and swine flu epidemics, Wuthnow provides a profound new understanding of the human reaction to existential vulnerability.

Robert Wuthnow is the Gerhard R. Andlinger '52 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.

"A solidly resourced, cogently analyzed, and persuasively argued brief."--Publishers Weekly

"Wuthnow considers the range of huge hazards that Americans have faced and asks, how have we responded? His answers are nuanced, penetrating, and wide-ranging. A fascinating intellectual journey led by a truly creative mind."--Lee Clarke, author of Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster and Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination

"In this carefully researched and subtly rendered sociological history, Wuthnow demonstrates that fear about great social dangers has been central to modern American life. Americans have responded to these fears with neither panic nor denial but with culture. By making fears meaningful, they have made sense out of them, and made action against them possible. There is wisdom here."--Jeffrey C. Alexander, author of Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate

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