Great Disasters

In the early 2000s in Chicago, six young men start high school. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them; Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it; and he and the others learn to lose themselves in alcohol. With each passing year—as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond; form new relationships with partners and children; and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country.

The incredible story of a flood of near-Biblical proportions - its destruction, its heroes and victims, and how it shaped America’s natural-disaster policies for the next century. The storm began March 23, 1913, with a series of tornadoes that killed 150 people and injured 400. Then the freezing rains started and the flooding began. It was the nation’s most widespread flood ever - more than 700 people died, hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings were destroyed, and millions were left homeless.

HYPOXIA CITY London has turned into a vast charnel house. The ozone layer has been torn apart, and the city's nine million citizens have perished, suffocated as the oxygen vanished. The streets are carpeted with the dead, they lie in heaps in the Royal Parks, while the Underground network has become a subterranean maze of poisonous gas. Hardly anyone escapes the apocalyptic nightmare. There is no help from outside because the entire world shares the same fate. Planet Earth has finally reached its carrying capacity and is collapsing like a convulsing corpse. 99% of people, gasping and ...

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 to Mississippi to Alabama.

“As a great lakes merchant mariner myself Great Lakes Freighter, Tanker, and Tugboat Disasters hit close to home. Skip Kadar’s book brings these tragedies to life with his thorough research and vivid storytelling. A gripping account of maritime history and what these sailors were faced with. A must read for anyone interested in great lakes shipping or maritime history.” —Caitlin Cummings, 1st Engineer From the fate of the 427-foot steamship Henry Steinbrenner in 1953 to the little 56-foot-long tugboat Sport's cold demise during a December night in 1923, Mr. Kadar tells a gripping ...

What do Trojan Horses, exploding blimps, and molasses tsunamis have in common? They’re all epic disasters that history tried to warn us about—yet somehow, we keep hitting “repeat.” In History’s Greatest Blunders: The Epic Fails We Can’t Stop Repeating, D.C. Smith turns up the volume on the past’s biggest screw-ups—from military missteps and tech crashes to ecological chaos and brilliant ideas gone hilariously wrong. Told with razor-sharp wit and unexpected insight, this isn’t your high school history class. It’s a fast-paced, laugh-out-loud journey through the failures ...

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

When the reservoirs run dry, war is the only currency left. The United States is collapsing under a historic drought. Cities are burning, crops are failing, and the President demands the one resource that still flows north of the border: Canada's water. Branded as a "policy shift," the demand is nothing less than an ultimatum. But Canada will not surrender. As U.S. forces push into Canadian territory, a fragile resistance forms. At its center stands John Mason-once a SIS "Watcher," now a reluctant fighter. Haunted by past missions and torn between love and loyalty, Mason is thrust into a ...

An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known, the Mississippi flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of nearly one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of blacks north, and transformed American society and politics forever.

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.

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes.

Giant earthquakes and tsunamis devastate western Oregon every 300 to 600 years. The last one hit in 1700, so we're due anytime. This informative, entertaining book tells the stories of Oregon's past floods, fires, and eruptions - including the Vanport Flood, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, and the Columbus Day Windstorm. Then it investigates the cycles behind our natural disasters and takes a look at what may happen when the next "Big One" strikes.

Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour.

From the NBC News correspondent and New York Times bestselling author of Separated, a gripping and revelatory account of the devastating 2025 Los Angeles fires, which he covered on the ground as an LA native.

The story of the world's largest, longest, and best-financed scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely tragic, and never before fully told. The immense 18th-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue.

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.

It’s 1927, and the most devastating flood in American history has swelled the Mississippi River to a width of eighty miles. In an attempt to save a family trapped by the rising water, four men in a tiny rowboat battle the treacherous flow: three are convicts, on loan from the local prison and pressed into service; the fourth, the leader of the team, is driven by his own hidden motives. But to their surprise upon arrival at Ballymore, an ancestral home protected by a high, circular levee, not everyone in the family feels the need to be saved.

Green Berets are "Masters of Chaos." What makes us elite is our planning. We prepare not only for the mission but for all the things that could go wrong. We worst-case scenarios in order to prevent them from happening, and being prepared if, despite our best efforts, they do occur. It is a unique mindset that is the hallmark of the Quiet Professionals. This book is about past disasters and how to avoid them in the future, mitigate their effects and learn from them. As you will see studying significant events, they didn’t just happen, and the people and organizations involved weren’t ...

It started in 1845 and lasted six years. Before it was over, more than one million men, women, and children starved to death and another million fled the country. Measured in terms of mortality, the Great Irish Potato Famine was one of the worst disasters in the 19th century-it claimed twice as many lives as the American Civil War. A perfect storm of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance sparked this catastrophe.

An estimated 36 million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster". As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent 20 years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father.