Social Science Disasters

Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people over several states are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Devices we rely on have gone dark. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and law and order are being tested as never before.

The best-selling author presents a heart-pounding account of the world's greatest nuclear disaster, based on sources not available before the fall of the Soviet Union. Read's enthralling account is filled with acts of courage - and also bumbling confusion, secrecy, lies, and coverups. Read spent many months in Russia interviewing hundreds of survivors and experts.

On June 28, 2013, a single bolt of lightning sparked an inferno that devoured more than 8,000 acres in Northern Arizona. Twenty elite firefighters - the Granite Mountain Hotshots - walked together into the blaze, tools in their hands and fire shelters on their hips. Only one of them walked out.

In November 1970, a storm set a collision course with the most densely populated coastline on Earth. Over the course of just a few hours, the Great Bhola Cyclone would kill 500,000 people and begin a chain reaction of turmoil, genocide, and war. The Vortex is the dramatic story of how that storm sparked a country to revolution.

On January 12, 2010, the deadliest earthquake in the history of the Western Hemisphere struck the nation least prepared to handle one. Jonathan M. Katz, the only full-time American news correspondent in Haiti, was inside his house when it buckled along with hundreds of thousands of others. In this visceral first-hand account, Katz takes readers inside the terror of that day, the devastation visited on ordinary Haitians, and through the monumental--yet misbegotten--rescue effort that followed.

On the morning of May 9, 1980, harbor pilot John Lerro was guiding a 600-foot freighter, the Summit Venture, into Tampa Bay. Directly in the ship's path was the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. Suddenly, a violent weather cell reduced visibility to zero at the precise moment when Lerro attempted to direct the 20,000-ton vessel underneath the bridge. Unable to stop or see where he was going, Lerro drove the ship into a support pier.

In August 1995, twenty-six passengers and a crew of three board a commuter plane in Atlanta headed for Gulfport, Mississippi. Shortly after takeoff they hear an explosion, and some see a mangled engine lodged against the wing. From that moment, nine minutes and twenty seconds elapse until the crippled plane crashes in a west Georgia hayfield. Gary Pomerantz takes listeners deep into the hearts and minds of the people aboard, each of whom prepares in his or her own way for what may come.

Dr. Steven Hatch first came to Liberia in November 2013 to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. Hundreds of victims perished each week; whole families were destroyed in a matter of days; so many died so quickly that the culturally taboo practice of cremation had to be instituted to dispose of the bodies.

Heidi is making new friends at Broomsfield Academy—in particular, a popular girl named Isabelle. But it turns out Isabelle has a big secret that Heidi discovers by accident! Heidi promises to keep the secret, but as more time goes by, it becomes more and more difficult…especially with nosy Melanie Maplethorpe snooping around. This secret is huge. Will Heidi be able to keep her promise?

When 1919 began, the city of Chicago seemed on the verge of transformation. Modernizers had an audacious, expensive plan to turn the city from a brawling, unglamorous place into "the Metropolis of the World". But just as the dream seemed within reach, pandemonium broke loose and the city’s highest ambitions were suddenly under attack by the same unbridled energies that had given birth to them in the first place.

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. Yet, as Maria Cristina Garcia observes in this critical history of U.S. policy on migration in the Global South, there is actually no such thing as a "climate refugee" under current U.S. law. Most initiatives intended to assist those who must migrate are flawed and ineffective from inception because they are derived from outmoded policies. In a world of climate change, U.S. refugee policy simply does not work.

Much of New Orleans still sat underwater the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina. Then a staff reporter for The New York Times, he was heading into the city to survey the damage. The interstate was eerily empty. Soldiers in uniform and armed with assault rifles stopped him. Water reached the eaves of houses for as far as the eye could see.

It’s goodbye, Brewster Elementary and hello, Broomsfield Academy when Heidi starts middle school at the only school in the country that has secret classes for witches in training! Heidi is excited but nervous about living on her own and making new friends (and new crushes)! Her first day takes a turn for the worse when Heidi discovers her roommate is none other than her old rival, Melanie Maplethorpe! Melanie is also less than thrilled, and the two find themselves engaged in an epic prank war. But when magic enters the mix, will the reluctant roommates go too far?

When former New York Times journalist Dan Koeppel texted his cousin Robert Meyer, a 20-year veteran of the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States, he expected to hear that things were hectic. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being overwhelmed, where do you think you are? Koeppel asked. Meyer’s grave reply - 100 - was merely the cusp of the crisis that would soon touch every part of the globe.

Mark Lynas delivers a vital account of the future of our earth, and our civilisation, if current rates of global warming persist. And it’s only looking worse. We are living in a climate emergency. But how much worse could it get? Will civilisation collapse? Are we already past the point of no return? What kind of future can our children expect? Rigorously cataloguing the very latest climate science, Mark Lynas explores the course we have set for Earth over the next century and beyond.

In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the front lines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother's native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY - a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind.

In Charlie Mike, Joe Klein tells the dramatic story of Eric Greitens and Jake Wood, larger-than-life war heroes who come home and use their military discipline and values to help others. This is a story that hasn't been told before, one of the most hopeful to emerge from Iraq and Afghanistan - a saga of lives saved, not wasted.

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil industry, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 90,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the story of this apocalyptic conflagration, John Vaillant explores the past and the future of our ever-hotter, more flammable world.

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.

The advent of the internet has been one of the most significant technological developments in history. In this thought-provoking and ground-breaking work David Eagleman, author of international best seller Sum, presents six ways in which the net saves us from major existential threats: pandemics, poor information flow, natural disasters, political corruption, resource depletion and economic meltdown.