Great Disasters

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...

New York Times Bestseller A "gripping, unshakeable firsthand account" (San Francisco Chronicle) of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from the MS NOW reporter and New York Times bestselling author of Separated, who covered the fires on the ground as an LA native. "Read[s] like a sci-fi...

In this the first comprehensive treatment of Pearl Harbor since the early 1990s, respected Pacific War naval historian Mark Stille traces the road to war and the Japanese attack itself. He examines the role of the man behind the operation, Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the plan. The American preparations for an attack are also carefully reviewed. The heart of the book is a comprehensive narrative of Pearl Harbor along with an appreciation of its results placed in proper perspective.

What if I told you that the largest radioactive accident happened in Brazil, not in Chernobyl? In Cesium 137, a summary of the real nightmare in Goiânia, the reader will find the report of the biggest accident with a radioactive source ever to occur in the world. Many readers and students know about the nuclear accident that occurred in Chernobyl, but they may not know that, a year later, in 1987, in the city of Goiânia, in Brazil, an accident as shocking as that in Chernobyl occurred. In this book, the author, Leandro Luiz, who is a physicist, explains in a clear and summarized way about...

One of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019! A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling “account that...

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.

A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind from the award-winning, best-selling author of The Tiger and The Golden Spruce “Riveting, spellbinding, astounding on every page…Captures the majesty and...

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award. 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 Great Mississippi...

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.

NUCLEAR DISASTER :: CHERNOBYL :: EXPLAINED FACTS :: WITH IMAGES :: UKRAINE :: USSR Do you really know what happened in Chernobyl? The clock read 01:23:40 in Chernobyl. But what really happened at Reactor 4 at that moment? Did the nuclear disaster end in 1986—or did it only just begin? What has humanity learned from the Chernobyl accident? Much has been said about the nuclear disaster that shook the world in 1986, but what you’ll find in this book is even more intriguing. "20 Facts You Didn't Know About Chernobyl" goes beyond the versions you learned at school or saw in TV series. The ...

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...

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.

“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 this gripping narrative history, Al Roker from NBC’s Today and the Weather Channel vividly examines the deadliest natural disaster in American history—a haunting and inspiring tale of tragedy, heroism, and resilience that is full of lessons for today’s new age of extreme weather. On the...

The first openly nonbinary contestant on America’s favorite cooking show falls for their clumsy competitor in this delicious romantic comedy debut “that is both fantastically fun and crack your heart wide open vulnerable.” (Rosie Danan, author of The Roommate) Recently divorced and on the...

An action filled short story where a couple opens a hotel on Catalina Island and it becomes popular with upscale visitors. Two couples take advantage and become unwelcome. It turns out that they are mob connected and take offense at being ejected. The resulting action encompasses the hotel, beach and most of the harbor. Not to be missed. Action at its finest.

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.

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 ...

The astonishing story of immigrants lured to the United States from India and trapped in forced labor—an "eye-opening" "must-read" told by the visionary labor leader who engineered their escape and set them on a path to citizenship (The New York Times Book Review). ​ In late 2006, Saket Soni...