Disasters & Disaster Relief Archives

The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation

The deadliest storm in modern history ripped Pakistan in two and led the world to the brink of nuclear war when American and Soviet forces converged in the Bay of Bengal

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 […Learn More]

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

Five mysterious billionaires summoned theorist Douglas Rushkoff to a desert resort for a private talk. The topic? How to survive the “Event”: the societal catastrophe they know is coming. Rushkoff came to understand that these men were under the influence of The Mindset, a Silicon Valley–style certainty that they and their cohort can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making—as long as they have enough money and the right technology. […Learn More]

Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood

When hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters strike, we count our losses, search for causes, commiserate with victims, and initiate relief efforts. Amply illustrated and expansively researched, Inventing Disaster explains the origins and development of this predictable, even ritualized, culture of calamity over three centuries, exploring its roots in the revolutions in science, information, and emotion that were part of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe and America. […Learn More]

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it
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Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire

The definitive firsthand account of California’s Camp Fire, the nation’s deadliest wildfire in a century, Paradise is a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the climate crisis unfolds

“A tour de force story of wildfire and a terrifying look at what lies ahead.”—San Francisco Chronicle […Learn More]

When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland

For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. Sarah G. Phillips’s When There Was No Aid offers us one such example.

Using evidence from Somaliland’s experience of peace-building, When There Was No Aid challenges two of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South. […Learn More]

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters […Learn More]