The Devil Never Sleeps

An indispensable guide to dealing with disasters from one of today’s foremost thinkers in crisis management, now updated with a new afterword.

“In a world marred by preventable miscalculation, Juliette Kayyem’s The Devil Never Sleeps provides a playbook for making it out alive.” —The New Yorker

The future may be unpredictable, but nowadays, disasters are not. We live in a time of consistent catastrophe, where things more often go wrong than right. So why do we still fumble when crisis strikes?

In The Devil Never Sleeps, Juliette Kayyem outlines a radical new way to prepare for disasters. Traditional principles of crisis management, focused on preventing disasters, are no longer viable. We need a forward-thinking approach that allows us to respond, recover, and build more resilience when crisis occurs.

Drawing on her experience in national security and assessing real-life examples—from natural disasters like the California wildfires to human-made ones like airplane collisions—Kayyem identifies common lessons that can be implemented now to limit harm in the future. The Devil Never Sleeps is an essential guide for developing strategies that actually work in the face of perpetual catastrophe.