Natural Disasters

At the dawn of the 20th century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms....

After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs....

The true story of two doomed ships and a daring search-and-rescue operation that shines a light on the elite Coast Guard swimmers trained for the most dangerous ocean missions....

In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America and the tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy in the land....

The true story behind the events that inspired the major motion picture Only the Brave. A "unique and bracing" (Booklist) first-person account by the sole survivor of Arizona's disastrous 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, which took the lives of 19 "hotshots"....

In March 1980, a napping volcano awoke. Two months later, the mountain roared. Author Richard Waitt was one of the first to arrive following the mountain's early rumblings. A geologist with intimate knowledge of Mount St. Helens, Waitt delivers a detailed and accurate chronicle of events.

Les Standiford, author of the John Deal thrillers, tells how the man who turned Florida's swamps into the playgrounds of the rich performed the almost superhuman feat of building a railroad from the mainland to Key West at the turn of the century....

Our world has ended five times: It has been broiled, frozen, poison gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids....

Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known, the Mississippi flood of 1927....

Kate Winkler Dawson's debut, Death in the Air, is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing....

On the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded...

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived....

Cathie Pelletier's breathtaking account of the 1952 snowstorm that blanketed New England, offers a valuable reminder about nature's capacity for destruction as well as insight into the human instinct for preservation....

Overboard! follows the simultaneous desperate struggles of boat passengers and the captain and first mate fighting for their lives in the storm-tossed sea....

In the best-selling tradition of A Perfect Storm and The Finest Hours, a harrowing account of the incredible true story of the recent shocking disappearance of El Faro....

January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves....

In this extraordinarily rare memoir by an active-duty jumper, Jason Ramos takes listeners into his exhilarating and dangerous world....

In an era where unpredictability is the only certainty, these essential guides are combined for those determined to be prepared for anything. This collection is not just about survival; it's about thriving in the face of the unknown.

No one likes to think of the worst case scenario, but if you're not prepared, "worst case" could become much worse than you ever imagined....You hope that you’ll never need an emergency plan, but the truth is, it’s only if you have one that you’ll be ready....

The Sixth Extinction draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines to provide a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept.

1 Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina....

In 536 AD, the sun dimmed, the sky turned a ghostly gray, and global temperatures plummeted. Crops withered, famine spread like wildfire, and entire civilizations were thrown into chaos.

In The Great Deluge, Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans resident and professor of history at Tulane University, rips the story of Katrina apart....

From ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman, and written using exclusive interviews and information comes the definitive account of the story that gripped the world: the rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped in a flooded cave miles underground for nearly three weeks....

A cargo ship ran aground off the coast of western Alaska's Aleutian Islands during a brutal storm, leading to one of the most incredible Coast Guard rescue missions of all time....