Disaster Culture

2015 saw the worst American maritime disaster in decades. The captain of the SS El Faro commanded his crew to sail straight into a hurricane. The ship sank and all 33 crew members died. The sinking raised troubling questions: Why did the captain choose to sail into the hurricane? Why did no one on board or on shore stop him? And why was such an old and heavily loaded ship even allowed on the water? The crew of the SS El Faro is gone, but their haunting final hours were preserved by the ship’s black box.

Nineteen-year-old Greg Sestero met Tommy Wiseau at an acting school in San Francisco. Wiseau's scenes were rivetingly wrong, yet Sestero, hypnotized by such uninhibited acting, thought, "I have to do a scene with this guy." That impulse changed both of their lives. The Disaster Artist is Greg Sestero's laugh-out-loud funny account of how Tommy Wiseau defied every law of artistry, business, and friendship to make "the Citizen Kane of bad movies" ( Entertainment Weekly), which is now an international phenomenon.

Eleven-year-old Nhamo is running for her life. When the village witch finder decrees that she must marry a cruel stranger to propitiate an evil spirit, her only recourse is to steal a fishing boat and go looking for a father she has never met. Alone on the Musengezi River, Nhamo has meager resources to help her survive loneliness, hunger, wild animals, and even land mines.

On a cold January morning in 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger, despite warnings against doing so by many individuals including Allan McDonald. The fiery destruction of Challenger on live television moments after launch remains an indelible image in the nation's collective memory. In Truth, Lies, and O-Rings, McDonald, a skilled engineer and executive, relives the tragedy from where he stood at Launch Control Center.

A Best Book of 2025 from Chicago Review of Books For fans of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Great Disasters is a stirring debut novel about six young men coming of age, and the enduring friendships that make us who we are—even as our paths diverge. This is...

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast from Louisiana...

In January 1990, the crew of Avianca Flight 52 told air traffic control, “We’re running out of fuel.” They never declared an emergency. The words were spoken, but the meaning never landed. Seventy-three people died. That gap—between knowing and speaking, and between speaking and being heard—is the subject of Speak Up!. This book examines some of the most consequential failures in modern history across aviation, medicine, aerospace, and corporate leadership. From the death of Libby Zion in a New York hospital to the collision at Tenerife, from the Challenger and Columbia space ...

Driven by eyewitness accounts and combining urban history with a life-and-death drama and a technological detective story, Floodpath grippingly reanimates the reality behind LA noir fictions like the classic film Chinatown. In an era of climate change, increasing demand on water resources, and a neglected American infrastructure, the tragedy of the St. Francis Dam has never been more relevant.

To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias - communities of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia - they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant.

Natural and man-made disasters have the power to destroy thousands of lives very quickly. Both as they unfold and in the aftermath, these forces of nature astonish the rest of the world with their incredible devastation and magnitude. In this collection of 10 well-known catastrophes such as the great Chicago fire, the sinking of the Titanic, and hurricane Katrina, Brenda Guiberson explores the causes and effects, as well as the local and global reverberations of these calamitous events.

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Revenant--basis for the award-winning motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio--tells the remarkable story of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history. The worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history began a half...

Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.

Almost 24 hours to the minute since the tsunami hit Fukushima Daiichi, Unit 1 exploded. The building wrenched apart, sending shards of irradiated concrete and metal knifing through the air in all directions. The reactor’s massive heavy-duty gantry crane bent like a twig and collapsed onto the refueling floor control room, crushing everything that wasn’t expelled in the blast. Outside, chunks of debris rained down on the fire crew, injuring five and shredding the hoses they had just laid.

Bestselling author and world-renowned chef David Lebovitz continues to mine the rich subject of his evolving ex-Pat life in Paris, using his perplexing experiences in apartment renovation as a launching point for stories about French culture, food, and what it means to revamp one's life...

Part memoir, part expert analysis, Disasterology is a passionate and personal account of a country in crisis—one unprepared to deal with the disasters of today and those looming in our future. With temperatures rising and the risk of disasters growing, our world is increasingly vulnerable...

A Story of Loss, Resilience, and Rebirth What happens when an entire city drowns — and still finds the courage to rise again? On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast and shattered New Orleans. Levees broke. Families fled. Entire neighborhoods disappeared beneath toxic floodwaters. For days, the world watched as America’s most vibrant city nearly ceased to exist. But this is not just a story of destruction. It’s a story of humanity, resilience, and a community that refused to let its culture die. Inside, you’ll discover: The full scope of the disaster — ...

Buildings were weaving in and out, the street pitched like a stormy sea and bricks were raining down all around him.... Experience first hand through young Jacob what it was like living through this country’s most destructive earthquake!

A witty, insightful, and delightfully snarky blend of pop culture meets memoir meets real-life Devil Wears Prada as readers learn the stories behind twenty-five years at Vanity Fair from the magazine’s former deputy editor “Dilettante offers the best seat in the house into the workings of...

Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton tried and failed to cross the coldest and windiest continent on Earth.

Award-winning author and illustrator Rosalyn Schanzer’s book Witches! was named a School Library Journal Best Book and a Chicago Public Library Best of the Best. Witches! recounts, in electrifying detail, the true events of the 17th-century witch trials in Salem Village, Massachusetts. After two girls exhibit strange behavior, the colonial town’s doctor concludes their symptoms are the result of witchcraft. The chilling events of this period remain one of the most disturbing passages of U.S. history.