World Disasters

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil.

At the beginning of 1940, Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust. Despite Hitler's grand ambitions and the successful early stages of the Third Reich's advances into Europe, Frank McDonough convincingly argues that Germany was only ever a middle-ranking power and never truly stood a chance against the combined forces of the Allies.

It was a warm night on April 26th, 1986. Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov, the Chernobyl Reactor 4 plant engineer, called for a safety test. The test was to figure out how to keep the reactor cool until the backup electrical generators could be turned on. Three similar tests had been conducted the year before, but they hadn't managed to produce any results. This test was going to be different.

A comprehensive catalog of the most devastating and deadly events-natural or man-made-in human history. If you follow the news it can seem like injury, sickness, and death are now constant, inescapable occurrences that threaten us every second of every day. But such catastrophic events - as terrible and frightening as they are - have been happening for as long as mankind has walked the Earth.... and even before. From ancient volcanoes and floods to epidemics of cholera and smallpox to Hitler's mass killings in the 20th century, humanity's continued existence has always seemed perilous.

The story of the world's largest, longest, and best-financed scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely tragic, and never before fully told. The immense 18th-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue.

Based on the sensational evidence of the U.S. Senate hearings, eyewitness accounts, and the results of the 1985 Woods Hole expedition that photographed the ship, this electrifying account vividly re-creates the Titanic's last desperate hours afloat and fully addresses the questions that have continued to haunt the the world’s most famous marine disaster.

1816 was a remarkable year - mostly for the fact that there was no summer. As a result of a volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora in Indonesia, weather patterns were disrupted worldwide for months, allowing for excessive rain, frost, and snowfall through much of the Northeastern US and Europe in the summer of 1816.

16-year-old Josh, a sailor and baseball fan, battles sharks and huge waves after a torpedo sinks the WWII USS Indianapolis battleship.From multi-award-winning Ellie Crowe and Scott Peters comes a high-seas adventure based on the true story of the world's deadliest shark attack on the brave sailors of the United States Navy. 16-year-old Josh is thrilled to be a WW2 sailor aboard the mighty USS Indianapolis. But when a Japanese torpedo strikes in the middle of the night, it tears the battleship in half. As the ship sinks, Josh is plunged deep into the black ocean. In horror, he watches the US...

Churchill's history of the Second World War is, and will remain, the definitive work. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction.

Jason and Sophie are teachers at a rural high school north of Tampa, Florida. When an EMP attack spreads chaos and lawlessness, they are unexpectedly left responsible for a group of their former students. Without electricity, phones, or transportation, civilization collapses, and terror reigns. Jason's background as a decorated Army Ranger former officer and his history as a prepper help them. But can they survive in a world where organized predators prey on the young and innocent?

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north.

It was a day like any other. People setting out on the commute to work or taking the kids to school or chatting to their friends in the park. Normal. Routine. Nothing to mark it apart. By lunchtime, everything they had ever known, every aspect of their lives, would be changed forever - marked by the most catastrophic series of global disasters to strike the planet in over 6000 years. MANKIND STANDS AT THE GATES OF EXTINCTION The world is being ripped apart by a great geological cataclysm. Cities crumble and entire continents disappear beneath the sea as earthquakes and mega-tsunamis lay ...

How often does a single tiny mistake cause an entire civilization to collapse? More often than you think! Listeners of Jared Knott’s book Tiny Blunders/Big Disasters will be amazed at the little things that changed history in a big way.

Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.

Our world has ended five times: It has been broiled, frozen, poison gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth's past dead ends, and in the process offers us a glimpse of our possible future. Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the 21st century have analogs in these five extinctions.

The economic collapse started in China. But the world's economies were interconnected and interdependent. Within hours, the collapse had spread around the world. Eldon Waters was a prepper, and had been ever since he married Felicia Gomez. He heard news of the economic collapse as he was getting ready to start a new work week. He knew immediately that chaos and violence would quickly erupt. His first priority was defending his family. He took his marriage vows seriously. He was prepared to lay down his life to keep his wife and children safe. That meant that they would need to escape the ...

Emma Peterson and her growing band of warriors have become skilled at protecting their homestead, but as they also defend others in need, they are increasingly at risk. In a world without laws the worst parts of human nature are revealed, and vicious predators thrive at the expense of the defenseless. Emma is driven to intervene to protect the innocent, but when she and her followers battle wickedness they pay an increasing price in blood and suffering. Is success even possible in their cruel and darkened world, or will the good inevitably perish with the evil? Follow Emma, Olivia, Shelby, ...

At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event spawned decades of conflicting, exaggerated, and inaccurate stories.

Brace yourself for the gripping sequel to the thrilling tale of survival and turmoil in the aftermath of the cataclysmic Broken Earth Event!Is humanity's fate sealed? Have we reached the end of our tenure on this planet? The Stone family and their friends survived the first 48 hours - barely, but planet-wide devastation and havoc continue, plunging the world into uncertainty and upheaval. Amidst this chaos, new alliances struggle to endure, with each of them doing all they can – and more – to persevere as the world falls into ruination. Embark on a thrilling journey through this tale of...

A geologist prepared for Armageddon finds his plans shattered when disaster overwhelms his predictions. A whistleblower determined to stop disaster any cost, even if it means being ridiculed, ignored … even killed. A retired Army Ranger, trying to save the planet's most precious resource, the Magnetosphere, from a cataclysmic collapse. Discover the Thrilling COMPLETE Trilogy! With just five days passed since catastrophe struck, the Stone family and their allies band together amid the ruins of civilization. As billions lie dead and the Sixth Great Extinction unfolds, they are forced to ...