Natural Disasters

At the dawn of the 20th century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms....

After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs....

The true story behind the events that inspired the major motion picture Only the Brave. A "unique and bracing" (Booklist) first-person account by the sole survivor of Arizona's disastrous 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, which took the lives of 19 "hotshots"....

Les Standiford, author of the John Deal thrillers, tells how the man who turned Florida's swamps into the playgrounds of the rich performed the almost superhuman feat of building a railroad from the mainland to Key West at the turn of the century....

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived....

On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in the worst American shipping disaster in 35 years....

Cathie Pelletier's breathtaking account of the 1952 snowstorm that blanketed New England, offers a valuable reminder about nature's capacity for destruction as well as insight into the human instinct for preservation....

2023 revealed the stark reality: the threat of nuclear war is not just possible, it's imminent. "Nuclear War Survival Skills 2024" is your essential guide to not just survive but thrive in the face of this looming danger.

January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves....

In this extraordinarily rare memoir by an active-duty jumper, Jason Ramos takes listeners into his exhilarating and dangerous world....

No one likes to think of the worst case scenario, but if you're not prepared, "worst case" could become much worse than you ever imagined....You hope that you’ll never need an emergency plan, but the truth is, it’s only if you have one that you’ll be ready....

On September 1, 1894, two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping over 2,000 people. Daniel J. Brown recounts the events surrounding the fire....

Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known, the Mississippi flood of 1927....

REVISED AND UPDATED EDITION Approximately 75,000 years ago, an event occurred that almost wiped out human life. According to a stunning new theory,...

If you were forced to evacuate during a disaster, you’d likely need dozens of tools and supplies to make it out safely. Problem is, too many people get it wrong - even the experts - because they focus on the wrong gear and supplies for the situation....

Kate Winkler Dawson's debut, Death in the Air, is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing....

The Sixth Extinction draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines to provide a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept.

On the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded...

In the tradition of The Perfect Storm, Sudden Sea hearkens back to a natural disaster that struck terror in the hearts of many. In this narrative, listeners experience the Great Hurricane of 1938, the most financially destructive storm on record....

Our world has ended five times: It has been broiled, frozen, poison gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids....

In March 1980, a napping volcano awoke. Two months later, the mountain roared. Author Richard Waitt was one of the first to arrive following the mountain's early rumblings. A geologist with intimate knowledge of Mount St. Helens, Waitt delivers a detailed and accurate chronicle of events.

On July 4, 1999, in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in the region's history. Gunflint Falling tells the story of this devastating storm.

The true story of two doomed ships and a daring search-and-rescue operation that shines a light on the elite Coast Guard swimmers trained for the most dangerous ocean missions....

Pandemic, climate change, or war: Our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run wild with visions of dreadful, abandoned cities and returning to the land in a desperate attempt at survival....

In The Great Deluge, Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, rips the story of Katrina apart....