10 Best Natural Disasters Books

From the bestselling author of The Devil in the White City , here is the true story of the deadliest hurricane in history. National Bestseller September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in American history–and Isaac Cline found himself the victim of a devastating personal tragedy. Using Cline’s own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, Erik Larson builds a chronicle of one man’s heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. Riveting, powerful, and unbearably suspenseful, Isaac’s Storm is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the great uncontrollable force of nature.

Now preppers can be ready for any possible emergency as James C. Jones shares his fifty years of experience as an advocate for survival, preparedness, and self-reliance. In Total Survival , veteran survivalist James C. Jones delivers tips that cover the most likely needs of readers and for which there is useful and practical instruction. His goal is to share a variety of practical survival skills, principles, and ideas in an easy-to read format that will aid the reader in becoming stronger, safer, and more self-reliant. The ten principles of survival that Jones sets out are derived from analysis of true survival accounts. Studies of why some people survived fires, plane crashes, assaults, and other deadly situations while others in the same situations perished confirm that these principles made the difference. His table of contents includes: * 1: Ten Principles of Survival (including Anticipate and Stay Calm) * 2: Ten Disasters to Prepare For (including Home Fire While Asleep and Home Invasion by Intruder). * 3: Ten Items for the Prepared Home (including Emergency Plans and Packs) * 4: Ten Items You Should Always Carry (including a Miniature LED flashlight and a Whistle) * 5: Ten Things You Should Have in Your Survival Pack(s) (including Water and Weapons) * 6: Ten Ways to Avoid and Survive Street Crime (including Carjacking and Active Shooter) * 7: Ten Self-Defense Moves You Should Know (including Front Choke Counter and Handgun Defenses) * 8: Ten Medical Skills You Should Know (including Cardiac Arrest and Shock) * 9: Ten Ways to Gather and Purify Water (including Boiling Water and Distillation) * 10: Ten Ways to Gather and Store Food (including Foraging and Trapping) * 11: Ten Ways to Start and Maintain a Fire (including Fire by Flit and Steel and Fire by Solar Heat * 12: Ten Shelters You Should Know How to Build (including Fallout Shelters and Snow Shelters) * 13: Terrorism Although the data and concepts in Total Survival are derived from accounts of acute disasters–such as tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and epidemics– they apply equally well to chronic disasters, such as economic decline, shortages, unemployment, climate change, and personal family or health issues. In reality, all of life is a survival challenge, and a survival emergency is just a high-intensity life test. These ten survival principles are the key to success in everyday life, especially during an emergency.

Washington Post • 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction in 2020 Finalist • Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Kirkus Reviews • Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 Library Journal • Best Science & Technology Books of 2020 Booklist • 10 Top Sci-Tech Books of 2020 New York Times Book Review • Editor’s Choice With A Furious Sky , best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin tells the history of America itself through its five-hundred-year battle with the fury of hurricanes. Hurricanes menace North America from June through November every year, each as powerful as 10,000 nuclear bombs. These megastorms will likely become more intense as the planet continues to warm, yet we too often treat them as local disasters and TV spectacles, unaware of how far-ranging their impact can be. As best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin contends, we must look to our nation’s past if we hope to comprehend the consequences of the hurricanes of the future. With A Furious Sky , Dolin has created a vivid, sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus’s New World voyages to the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes, such as Benito Vines, a nineteenth-century Jesuit priest whose innovative methods for predicting hurricanes saved countless lives, and puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history. Dolin draws on a vast array of sources as he melds American history, as it is usually told, with the history of hurricanes, showing how these tempests frequently helped determine the nation’s course. Hurricanes, it turns out, prevented Spain from expanding its holdings in North America beyond Florida in the late 1500s, and they also played a key role in shifting the tide of the American Revolution against the British in the final stages of the conflict. As he moves through the centuries, following the rise of the United States despite the chaos caused by hurricanes, Dolin traces the corresponding development of hurricane science, from important discoveries made by Benjamin Franklin to the breakthroughs spurred by the necessities of the World War II and the Cold War. Yet after centuries of study and despite remarkable leaps in scientific knowledge and technological prowess, there are still limits on our ability to predict exactly when and where hurricanes will strike, and we remain terribly vulnerable to the greatest storms on earth. A Furious Sky is, ultimately, a story of a changing climate, and it forces us to reckon with the reality that as bad as the past has been, the future will probably be worse, unless we drastically reimagine our relationship with the planet. 103 black-and-white illustrations; 8 pages of color illustrations

Erik Larson is a regular contributor to national magazines including Time , The Atlantic , and Harper’s. Filled with images as powerful as the hurricane it describes, Isaac’s Storm immediately swept onto best seller lists across the country. In 1900, Isaac Monroe Cline was in charge of the Galveston station of the US Weather Bureau. He was a knowledgeable, seasoned weatherman who considered himself a scientist. When he heard the deep thudding of waves on Galveston’s beach in the early morning of September 8, however, Cline refused to be alarmed. The city had been hit by bad weather before. But by the time this storm had moved across Galveston, at least 6,000 – probably closer to 10,000 – people were dead, and Cline would never look at hurricanes the same way again. Based on a wealth of primary sources, Erik Larson’s unforgettable work will haunt you long after the final sentence. Narrator Richard M. Davidson infuses each chapter with added intensity.

In THE WORST HARD TIME, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. 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. On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in an eyeblink. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men — college boys, day-workers, immigrants from mining camps — to fight the fires. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force, through the eyes of the people who lived it. Equally dramatic, though, is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by every citizen. The robber barons fought him and the rangers charged with protecting the reserves, but even as TR’s national forests were smoldering they were saved: The heroism shown by those same rangers turned public opinion permanently in favor of the forests, though it changed the mission of the forest service with consequences felt in the fires of today. THE BIG BURN tells an epic story, paints a moving portrait of the people who lived it, and offers a critical cautionary tale for our time.

Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink ‘s landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina–and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and maintain life amid chaos. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several of those caregivers faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Five Days at Memorial , the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing. In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are for the impact of large-scale disasters–and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis. One of The New York Times ‘ Best Ten Books of the Year

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity’s future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years – enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes – those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting- edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister’s Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice , he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last.