Six top books about the allure of crowds and community

John Drury is professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex; his research interests focus on collective behaviour in mass emergencies, riots and other crowd events.

At the Guardian he tagged six of the best books about the allure of crowds and community, including:

New bonds of community are often created by disaster, as Rebecca Solnit charts in A Paradise Built in Hell. The shanty town built by survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the self-organised evacuations New Yorkers arranged with strangers after 9/11, show how people facing a common fate can see themselves as belonging to a single group. Like the Covid-19 mutual aid groups we see today, these altruistic communities provide glimpses of an alternative world.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue