Book Review: Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11 by Lindsay Thomas.

Lindsay Thomas, Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11 (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), pp. xiv + 287, $112 Thomas's timely study provides us with an extremely useful reminder that, as she writes, 'the discourse of preparedness naturalizes disaster by making it unremarkable, conditioning citizens to accept catastrophe as part of everyday life' (p. x). Thomas adds: 'The repugnance at the heart of resilience [...] is a repugnance at the continued survival of those who have been made killable' (p. 123). Mbembe writes that some people in society are simply "disposable" (and, of course, equally, those who are not) and Thomas argues that "governmentality makes some people [...] killable" (p. 122). [Extracted from the article]