True Disasters

Best-selling author Rachel Gibson is acclaimed for her quick-witted and endearing romances. True Love and Other Disasters begins as the Seattle Chinooks hockey team owner dies, bequeathing the team to his young widow, Faith. Faith is determined to be taken seriously as the owner, and she’s not going to let anyone—especially dreamy star player Ty Savage—get in her way.

On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of the crew, which included New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in twentieth-century history—one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened, and why, has never been told.

In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school - one of the most modern in the Midwest - Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it.

After her plane crashes, a 17-year-old girl spends 11 days walking through the Peruvian jungle. Against all odds, with no food, shelter, or equipment, she gets out. A better equipped group of adult survivors of the same crash sits down and dies. What makes the difference?

Man’s struggle against the sea is a theme that has created some of the world’s most exciting stories. Now, in the tradition of Moby Dick comes a New York Times best seller destined to become a modern classic. Written by journalist Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm combines an intimate portrait of a small fishing crew with fascinating scientific data about boats and weather systems.

In July 1973, Bob Tininenko, his wife Linda, and his brother in-law Jim Fisher set sail from Tacoma, Washington, on a 31-foot trimaran, down the West Coast to Costa Rica. The journey was expected to take a matter of weeks, but 10 days into the cruise, the party encountered a freak storm off the coast of Northern California. When gale-force winds and 50-foot waves capsized their boat, the voyage became a nightmare. For 72 days, the trio was lost at sea. Challenged by nature and compromised by a bitter rivalry, their courage and will to live was put to the ultimate test.

In the winter of 1952, New England was battered by the most brutal nor’easter in years. As the weather wreaked havoc on land, the freezing Atlantic became a wind-whipped zone of peril, setting the stage for one of the most heroic rescue stories ever lived. On February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer, were in the same horrifying predicament. Built with “dirty steel,” and not prepared to withstand such ferocious seas, both tankers split in two, leaving the dozens of men on board utterly at the Atlantic’s mercy.

Are you ready for the leadership moment? Learn valuable lessons from the stories of Merck's Roy Vagelos, who commits millions of dollars to develop a drug needed only by people who can't afford it; Eugene Kranz, who struggles to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home after an explosion rips through their spacecraft; Arlene Blum, who organizes the first women's ascent of one of the world's most dangerous mountains; Nancy Barry, who leads Women's World Banking in the fight against Third World poverty; and more.

In early May of 2005, Captain Tom Tighe and first mate, Loch Reidy, of the sailboat Almeisan welcomed three new crew members, two men and a woman, for a five-day voyage from Connecticut to Bermuda. While Tighe and Reidy had made the journey countless times, the rest of the crew were paying passengers learning about offshore sailing—and looking for adventure. Four days into their voyage, they got adventure but nothing that they had expected or had any training to handle.

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.

Fatal Forecast chronicles a dramatic fight for survival aboard two small fishing boats that were ambushed by a horrific surprise storm just southeast of Cape Cod. Soon after the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever reached the fishing ground at Georges Bank, they were hit with hurricane-force winds and massive 90-foot waves that battered the boats for hours. The direction of the wind made it impossible to turn back.

The Esperanza Fire started October 26, 2006, in the San Jacinto Mountains above the Banning Pass near Cabazon, California. It destroyed 41,000 acres and dozens of homes and cost the taxpayers $16 million dollars. But by far the highest costs of the conflagration were the lives of the five-man crew of Engine 57, the first engine crew ever killed fighting a wildland blaze. Fire and superheated gases had erupted in a freak "area ignition," sending flames racing across three-quarters of a mile in mere seconds, engulfing the crew and the house they were defending.

When the fishing vessel La Conte sinks suddenly at night in 100-mile-per-hour winds and record 90-foot seas during a savage storm in January 1998, her five crewmen are left to drift without a life raft in the freezing Alaskan waters and survive as best they can. One hundred fifty miles away, in Sitka, Alaska, an H-60 Jayhawk helicopter lifts off from America's most remote Coast Guard base in the hopes of tracking down an anonymous Mayday signal. A fisherman's worst nightmare has become a Coast Guard crew's desperate mission.

For John and Laura Foster, what began as a fairy-tale honeymoon in 1857 aboard the steamship SS Vandervere quickly turns into a nightmare. A terrible hurricane strikes, and the grand ship begins to sink. Just before it goes under, a rescue ship appears on the horizon. But it only has room enough to save the women and children.

In this Third Edition of our Preparedness Guide, we aim to give the everyday urbanite/suburbanite a starting point to build a buffer of safety and security in the face of a disaster situation. We firmly believe resilience is built through knowledge and preparation. Disaster preparedness is only as complicated as you make it, therefore there is little reason why anyone living in urban environments (including apartments and condos) cannot implement effective measures to mitigate localized disasters.

A raging wildfire burns thousands of homes. A violent earthquake creates a giant tsunami that destroys countless lives. A giant tornado wipes a small town off the map. Discover the true stories of people who survived these terrible disasters and lived to tell the tale in this book from the Fighting to Survive series.

Angie Orth should have had at least 2.5 kids by now—everyone else back home did. Despite a successful PR career in New York, Angie was failing at the roles she was born to play—those of submissive wife and grandchild incubator. Without a potential husband in sight or the hope of a photogenic brood to show off, she was beginning to wonder if God forgot about her.

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 the best-selling tradition of The Devil in the White City, award-winning author Brian Hicks tells the explosive story of the Morro Castle, the elegant luxury liner that burned off the coast of New Jersey on September 7, 1934. The captain died under mysterious circumstances seven hours before his ship caught fire off the New Jersey coast.

Fighting Crime in the Largest City West of the Mississippi Famous robbers. A Trunk Murder. The deadliest incident in St. Louis Police history. This book covers some of the most significant crimes affecting the city from 1860 to 1909, when it was the largest city west of the Mississippi River. These true stories are stranger than fiction.