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.

How history’s most infamous disasters shaped the field of engineering, from the creator of the popular YouTube channel Practical Engineering When a giant bridge collapses, a gas explosion blows up a building, or a major dam bursts, it’s hard not to wonder how things could have gone so...

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...

The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at...

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.

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

From award-winning ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman, and written using exclusive interviews and information comes the definitive account of the dramatic story that gripped the world: the miracle rescue of twelve boys and their soccer coach trapped in a flooded cave miles...

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...

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 — ...

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...

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 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 ...

*Winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction* A Heartland Booksellers Award Nominee An NPR Best Book of the Year A BookPage Best Book of the Year A Library Journal Best Winter/Spring Debut of 2020 A Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from the Boston Globe and The Millions A Best Book of...

Brought to you by Penguin. Wreckers sinks the old narratives of imperialism, revealing the violent, chaotic and improvised reality of empire-building from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. While figures such as Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan are celebrated for...

The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end - if indeed it will - and why we can't stop fantasizing about it.

**Kirkus Best Books of the Year (2013)** **Kansas City Star Best Books of the Year (2013)** A passionate student of Japanese poetry, theater, and art for much of her life, Gretel Ehrlich felt compelled to return to the earthquake-and-tsunami-devastated Tohoku coast to bear witness, listen to...

In two southern Illinois towns only forty miles apart, explosions killed 111 men at the Centralia No. 5 mine in 1947 and 119 men at the New Orient No. 2 mine in West Frankfort in 1951. Robert E. Hartley and David Kenney explain the causes of the accidents, identify who was to blame, and detail the emotional impact the disasters had on the survivors, their families, and their communities.

«En esta novela, la catástrofe se cuenta con precisión de cronista y belleza poética. Sus voces transcurren entre el tono íntimo y devastador de un diario del desastre y la mirada colectiva de la memoria que ve la esperanza en el linaje de resistencias que han enfrentado al poder desde...