True Disasters

Fighting Crime in the Largest City West of the Mississippi Famous robbers. A Trunk Murder. The deadliest incident in St. Louis Police history. This book covers some of the most significant crimes affecting the city from 1860 to 1909, when it was the largest city west of the Mississippi River. These true stories are stranger than fiction.

In the winter of 1952, New England was battered by the most brutal nor’easter in years. As the weather wreaked havoc on land, the freezing Atlantic became a wind-whipped zone of peril, setting the stage for one of the most heroic rescue stories ever lived. On February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer, were in the same horrifying predicament. Built with “dirty steel,” and not prepared to withstand such ferocious seas, both tankers split in two, leaving the dozens of men on board utterly at the Atlantic’s mercy.

When the fishing vessel La Conte sinks suddenly at night in 100-mile-per-hour winds and record 90-foot seas during a savage storm in January 1998, her five crewmen are left to drift without a life raft in the freezing Alaskan waters and survive as best they can. One hundred fifty miles away, in Sitka, Alaska, an H-60 Jayhawk helicopter lifts off from America's most remote Coast Guard base in the hopes of tracking down an anonymous Mayday signal. A fisherman's worst nightmare has become a Coast Guard crew's desperate mission.

Brace for Impact: Stories of Hope and Horror Fifteen plane crashes. Fifteen stories of survival. From the frozen wastelands of Siberia to the depths of the Amazon rainforest, Brace for Impact captures the raw terror, resilience, and impossible decisions faced by those who lived through aviation disasters. Some found hope in the wreckage—others faced the brutal realities of isolation, injury, and the unforgiving elements. Told with gripping intensity, these true-to-life narratives echo the haunting suspense of your favorite Survival Stories, placing you inside the doomed cabins, the ...

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.

🔥 25 True Survival Stories That Defy Belief 🔥 🌍 Lost in the wild. Trapped at sea. Buried alive. And yet… they survived. 📖 Lost but Alive is a gripping collection of real-life survival stories—tales of people who should have never made it out alive. Through sheer willpower, instinct, and unbreakable resilience, they did the impossible. Inside, you’ll discover: ✅ A lone hiker who fell into a canyon and waited days for rescue. ✅ A sailor stranded in open water, surviving on rainwater and fish. ✅ A plane crash victim who trekked through the Amazon for weeks. ✅ The only...

Normalcy is a fragile thing. For the people in these twenty real-life accounts, it shattered in an instant. What happens when the ground opens up, the sky falls, or a wall of fire consumes everything in its path? When the mundane world of deadlines and daily routines is replaced by a desperate fight for the next breath? SURVIVING - Disasters places you directly into the heart of catastrophe. Journey alongside ordinary people—parents, teachers, and commuters—thrown into the most extreme situations imaginable. From catastrophic tsunamis and terrifying wildfires to sudden building ...

For John and Laura Foster, what began as a fairy-tale honeymoon in 1857 aboard the steamship SS Vandervere quickly turns into a nightmare. A terrible hurricane strikes, and the grand ship begins to sink. Just before it goes under, a rescue ship appears on the horizon. But it only has room enough to save the women and children.

“When Trust Turns to Tragedy” Every day, we put our lives in the hands of medical professionals. We trust that the surgeon holding the scalpel, the doctor reading our charts, and the nurse administering medication are competent, careful, and committed to our well-being. Most are. But sometimes, that trust is betrayed — not by malice, but by something more dangerous: negligence, ego, burnout, or systematic failure. Medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death in the United States, yet many of these cases remain buried in sealed settlements and quiet courtroom deals. The ...

Fatal Forecast chronicles a dramatic fight for survival aboard two small fishing boats that were ambushed by a horrific surprise storm just southeast of Cape Cod. Soon after the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever reached the fishing ground at Georges Bank, they were hit with hurricane-force winds and massive 90-foot waves that battered the boats for hours. The direction of the wind made it impossible to turn back.

Best-selling author Rachel Gibson is acclaimed for her quick-witted and endearing romances. True Love and Other Disasters begins as the Seattle Chinooks hockey team owner dies, bequeathing the team to his young widow, Faith. Faith is determined to be taken seriously as the owner, and she’s not going to let anyone—especially dreamy star player Ty Savage—get in her way.

A true life recounting of true events that make up the lives of the author and his mother. Events told in detail and, in the genre of memoire-fiction.

On the morning of July 3, 1994, a misreported forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado became one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. In this dramatic reconstruction of the disaster and its aftermath, John N. MacLean tells the heroic and cautionary story of nature at its most unforgiving.

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?

At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event spawned decades of conflicting, exaggerated, and inaccurate stories.

Seventy-foot waves batter a torn life raft 250 miles out tosea in one of the world's most dangerous places, the Gulf Stream. Hanging on to the raft are three men, a Canadian, a Brit, and their captain, Jean Pierre de Lutz, a dual citizen of America and France. Their capsized forty-seven-foot sailboat has filled with water and disappeared below the tempestuous sea. The giant waves repeatedly toss the men out of their tiny vessel, and JP, with ninebroken ribs, is hypothermic and on the verge of death.

They are all gone now―the Titanic survivors. No human being who stood on her decks that fateful night was alive to commemorate the event on its 100th anniversary. Their stories are with us, however, and the lessons remain. From the moment the world learned the Titanic had sunk, we wanted to know, who had survived? Those answers didn’t come until the evening of Thursday, April 18, 1912―when the Cunard liner Carpathia finally reached New York with the 706 survivors who had been recovered from Titanic’s lifeboats. Harold Bride, “Titanic’s surviving wireless operator,” relayed the...

In early May of 2005, Captain Tom Tighe and first mate, Loch Reidy, of the sailboat Almeisan welcomed three new crew members, two men and a woman, for a five-day voyage from Connecticut to Bermuda. While Tighe and Reidy had made the journey countless times, the rest of the crew were paying passengers learning about offshore sailing—and looking for adventure. Four days into their voyage, they got adventure but nothing that they had expected or had any training to handle.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster, based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research—a riveting history that flows like a thriller.

During the height of the blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard dispatched a patrol boat, but was soon in as much trouble as the tanker. Then pilot boat captain Frank Quirk, hearing of the Coast Guard's troubles on his radio, decided to act.