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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorBlizzard of Glass: The Halifax Explosion of 1917
Sally M. Walker · 151 pages
Recounts the story from World War I in which two towns were leveled and almost two thousand people killed following the collision of two warships in Halifax Harbour and a blizzard that dumped over a foot of snow in the area.
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
Timothy Egan · 336 pages
Narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire of August, 1910, and Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservation efforts that helped turn 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 White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche
Gary Krist · 315 pages
"In February 1910, a monstrous blizzard hit Washington State. High in the Cascade Mountains near the tiny town of Wellington, two trainloads of cold, hungry passengers and their crews found their railcars buried in rising drifts, parked precariously on the edge of a steep ravine. An army of the Great Northern Railroad's men worked round-the-clock to rescue the trains, but the storm was unrelenting
A Crack in the Edge of the World
Simon Winchester · 462 pages
The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard's Most Daring Sea Rescue
Michael Tougias, Casey Sherman · 224 pages
Look no further for the real-life adventure of the year! The Finest Hours is a rousing page-turner, a fascinating history, and an inspiring ode to the courage and professionalism of men who face bitter winds and black mountainous seas... all to do a dangerous job. Put it on the shelf next to The Perfect Storm. That's where it belongs -- William Martin, New York Times Best Selling author of Cape Co
The Johnstown Flood
David McCullough · 302 pages
At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Ca
Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894
Daniel James Brown · 296 pages
A Night to Remember
Walter Lord · 209 pages
She was the world's biggest-ever ship. A luurious miracle of twentieth-century technology, the Titanic was equipped with the most ingenious safety devices of the time. Yet on a moonlit night in 1912, the "unsinkable" Titanic raced across the glassy Atlantic on her maiden voyage, with only twenty lifeboats for 2,207 passengers. A Night to Remember is the gut-wrenching, minute-by-minute account of h
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
John M. Barry · 528 pages
In 1927, the Mississippi River swept across an area roughly equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, leaving water as deep as thirty feet on the land stretching from Illinois and Missouri south to the Gulf of Mexico. Close to a million people - in a nation of 120 million - were forced out of their homes. Some estimates place the death toll in the thousands.
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
Stephen Puleo · 273 pages
Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters was playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window. "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank fille
The Storm of the Century: Tragedy, Heroism, Survival, and the Epic True Story of America's Deadliest Natural Disaster: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900
Al Roker, William Hogeland
Death On The Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster Of 1914
Cassie Brown, Harold Horwood · 243 pages
***Each year, for generations, poor, ill-clad Newfoundland fisherman sailed out 'to the ice' to hunt seals in the hope of a few pennies in wages from the prosperous merchants of St. John's.*** The year ***1914 witnessed*** the worst in the long line of tragedies that were part of their harsh way of life. For two long, freezing days and nights a party of seal hunters--***one hundred thirty-two men-
Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938
R.A. Scotti · 296 pages
The massive destruction wreaked by the Hurricane of 1938 dwarfed that of the Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Earthquake, and the Mississippi floods of 1927, making the storm the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Now, R.A. Scotti tells the story. Hurricane was a foreign word in New England then. People didn't know how to pronounce it. They didn't know what it meant, and whatever it meant,
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Nathaniel Philbrick · 320 pages
In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage to hunt whales. Fifteen months later, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale.
Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans
Don Brown · 96 pages
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina's monstrous winds and surging water overwhelmed the protective levees around low-lying New Orleans, Louisiana. Eighty percent of the city flooded, in some places under twenty feet of water. Property damages across the Gulf Coast topped $100 billion. One thousand eight hundred and thirty-three people lost their lives. The tale of this historic storm and the dro
Fatal Forecast: An Incredible True Tale of Disaster and Survival at Sea
Michael Tougias · 247 pages
A true story of catastrophe and survival at sea. One November morning in 1980, two small lobster boats set out for Georges Bank, a bountiful but perilous fishing ground 130 miles off the Massachusetts coast. The forecast was for typical fall weather--but a colossal storm was brewing to the southeast, a maelstrom the National Weather Service did not accurately locate until the boats were already in
The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
Douglas Brinkley · 716 pages
An account of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation it left in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast documents the events and repercussions of the tragedy and its aftermath and the ongoing crisis confronting the region.
Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire
John N. Maclean · 288 pages
"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 seemingly small human error foreshadowed the numerous other minor errors that, three days later, would be c
Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
Erik Larson · 385 pages
"At the dawn of the twentieth 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. The idea that a hurricane could damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based, was to him preposterous, "an absurd delusion." It was 1900, a year when America fel
Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
Dan Baum · 311 pages
The hidden history of a haunted and beloved city told through the intersecting lives of nine remarkable characters After Hurricane Katrina, Dan Baum moved to New Orleans to write about the city's response to the disaster for The New Yorker. He quickly realized that Katrina was not the most interesting thing about New Orleans, not by a long shot. The most interesting question, which struck him as h
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
Sheri Fink · 558 pages
Fink provides a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina-- and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice. 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 health professionals faced criminal all
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Adam Higginbotham · 538 pages