The myth of the Greatest Chicago Fire -- or how disaster books make good reading right now

CHICAGO — John Updike was visiting family in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001. He wrote later about watching Manhattan explode and crumble that day as if it were episodic TV, a perfect day with perfect reception, though every time he tuned in, hoping for the finale, “The nightmare is still on.” That returned to me this summer as I read an unnatural amount about natural disasters, and manmade disasters, plagues, infernos, dust storms, earthquakes and climate-led extinctions. I would read Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” her 1993 novel set in a United States dissolving into anarchy — “You’...

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