Deborah E. Gibbons’ book, Communicable Crises: Prevention, Response, and Recovery in the Global Arena provides an overarching look at how countries and organizations can best prepare for and respond to large-scale, emergency crisis situations when they inevitably arise within their organization. The book puts a more focused emphasis on those unpredictable, large-scale, disasters that cannot be successfully anticipated such as 9/11 or the Sumatran Earthquake and resulting Tsunami. The structure of the book is broken down into 12 separate chapters that are each authored by separate crisis communications experts. Personally, I liked this aspect because it kept the information from becoming dull because the same person was not writing throughout the entire book.
The book forced the reader to consider many different crisis situations and possible responses that are not commonly considered. However, certain chapters were much more relevant to a class such as Crisis Communication and I would not necessarily recommend assigning the entire book. Instead, I would recommend assigning specific chapters. Each chapter is authored by individual experts and the topics are wide-ranging from one to the next, with certain topics being more relevant than others. The chapters that I chose not to recommend focused on one small area of crisis response, for example, the specific technological changes and improvements that could help reduce problems with disaster response. This topic went into too much detail about one specific part of handling crises for this class in particular.
The chapters that I did recommend included a much broader look at crisis planning as a whole and gave practical advice for responding in situations such as the SARS crisis and how to successfully organize multiple countries. Another great chapter was the one about emergent institutionalism because it went into a little more detail about how to effectively organize large groups of people when presented with a new and unpredictable large-scale crisis. It talks about how in order to successfully handle an emerging crisis, there must be a mobilization of a diverse group of people and there must also be a plan in place to allow these people to successfully work together and collaborate. This method of handling crises is applicable to any crisis situation and it would be a great teaching tool for students because it gave real world examples including how the United Kingdom handled the Mad Cow Disease outbreak. The examples provided a way to clearly break down the situation and analyzed the response from every angle.
Ultimately, I would recommend chapters 1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 to be used in a classroom setting. These specific chapters deal with more specific and relatable topics and are easier to digest for a student. They discuss specific case studies and show the crisis response from beginning to end and in a holistic way.
Kelsey Lemieur
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
The book forced the reader to consider many different crisis situations and possible responses that are not commonly considered. However, certain chapters were much more relevant to a class such as Crisis Communication and I would not necessarily recommend assigning the entire book. Instead, I would recommend assigning specific chapters. Each chapter is authored by individual experts and the topics are wide-ranging from one to the next, with certain topics being more relevant than others. The chapters that I chose not to recommend focused on one small area of crisis response, for example, the specific technological changes and improvements that could help reduce problems with disaster response. This topic went into too much detail about one specific part of handling crises for this class in particular.
The chapters that I did recommend included a much broader look at crisis planning as a whole and gave practical advice for responding in situations such as the SARS crisis and how to successfully organize multiple countries. Another great chapter was the one about emergent institutionalism because it went into a little more detail about how to effectively organize large groups of people when presented with a new and unpredictable large-scale crisis. It talks about how in order to successfully handle an emerging crisis, there must be a mobilization of a diverse group of people and there must also be a plan in place to allow these people to successfully work together and collaborate. This method of handling crises is applicable to any crisis situation and it would be a great teaching tool for students because it gave real world examples including how the United Kingdom handled the Mad Cow Disease outbreak. The examples provided a way to clearly break down the situation and analyzed the response from every angle.
Ultimately, I would recommend chapters 1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 to be used in a classroom setting. These specific chapters deal with more specific and relatable topics and are easier to digest for a student. They discuss specific case studies and show the crisis response from beginning to end and in a holistic way.
Kelsey Lemieur
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill