Natural Disasters

The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and The Map That Changed the World examines the enduring and world-changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the earth's most dangerous volcano -- Krakatoa. The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the...

Narrated by the author: Experience the Southern California wildfires through Jacob Soboroff’s eyes—and voice. New York Times Bestseller and #1 Los Angeles Times Bestseller A "gripping, unshakeable firsthand account" (San Francisco Chronicle) of the firestorm that consumed Los Angeles, from...

Man’s struggle against the sea is a theme that has created some of the world’s most exciting stories....

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...

The fast-paced and gripping true account of the extraordinary construction and spectacular demise of the Key West Railroad—one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, destroyed in one fell swoop by the strongest storm ever to hit U.S. shores. In 1904, the brilliant and driven...

How carbon dioxide made planet Earth, shaped human history, and now holds our future in the balance Every year, we are dangerously warping the climate by putting gigantic amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. But CO2 isn’t merely the by-product of burning fossil fuels—it is also...

The saga of the greatest tornado chaser who ever lived: a tale of obsession and daring and an extraordinary account of humanity’s high-stakes race to understand nature’s fiercest phenomenon from Brantley Hargrove, “one of today’s great science writers” (The Washington Post). At the...

On September 1, 1894 two forest fires converged on the town of Hinckley, Minnesota, trapping over 2,000 people. Daniel J. Brown recounts the events surrounding the fire in the first and only book on to chronicle the dramatic story that unfolded. Whereas Oregon's famous "Biscuit" fire in 2002...

One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year 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. In this brave and searingly frank memoir...

A heart-stopping true-life tale of maritime disaster,survival, and daring rescue from a master storyteller....

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE The 10th Anniversary Edition of the powerful and important work about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a compelling account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes. Over the last half a billion years...

On the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded by the district's Bureau of Land Management office as taking place in South Canyon, thereby mislabeling forever one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. That...

“An intense, immersive deep dive into a wild, dangerous, and unknown world, written with the pace and appeal of a great thriller. This is nonfiction at its very best.”—Lee Child The true story of two doomed ships and a daring search-and-rescue operation that shines a light on the elite...

From renowned writer and travel journalist Gary Krist comes the never-before-told story of one of the worst rail disasters in US history in which two trains full of people, trapped high in the Cascade Mountains, are hit by a devastating avalanche. In February 1910, a monstrous blizzard centered...

ike Davis discloses the relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history....

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...

A rare inside look at the thrilling world of smokejumpers, the airborne firefighters who parachute into the most remote and rugged areas of the United States, confronting the growing threat of nature's blazes. Forest and wildland fires are growing larger, more numerous, and deadlier every 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...

When a massive wildfire surrounded Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, five monks risked their lives to save it. A gripping narrative as well as a portrait of the Zen path and the ways of wildfire, Fire Monks reveals what it means to meet a crisis with full presence of mind....

As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass extinctions and, in the process, offers us a glimpse of...

The earth has died many times, and it always comes back looking different....

A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping true story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again. The inspiration for the Apple Original Film The Lost Bus, starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera “A tour de force story of...

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....

With powerful emotion and gripping detail, Kim Cross weaves together the heart-wrenching stories of several characters to create a nail-biting chronicle in the Tornado Alley of America....

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....