A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a book by American writer Rebecca Solnit, published by Viking Press in 2009.

Solnit lives in San Francisco, and A Paradise Built in Hell was inspired by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which she described as "a remarkable occasion for a lot of us, a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down".

[1] This article led to the idea for A Paradise Built in Hell, which Solnit characterized as presenting "a radically different view of human nature and possibility" based on the premise that "what happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority".

Strand understood the examples in the book "not as a stirring catalogue of good-doing but as a thoughtful assessment of what the human response to disaster can tell us about our political and social structures", and praised Solnit for her "compassion and complexity".

[5] Dwight Garner offered a positive review in The New York Times, characterizing the book as "an investigation not of a thought but of an emotion: the fleeting, purposeful joy that fills human beings in the face of disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and even terrorist attacks".