Great Disasters

Professor Connel Fullenkamp of Duke University guides listeners through four centuries of economic disasters - from tulip mania in the 1600s to the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Each of his 24 lectures covers a notable incident of financial misfortune or folly that is worthy of a Hollywood thriller.

This audiobook tells the story of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and the subsequent fires.

Discover the story of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, an inferno that forever changed the city's skyline.

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. London was still recovering from the devastation...

The astonishing story of immigrants lured to the United States from India and trapped in forced labor—an "eye-opening" "must-read" told by the visionary labor leader who engineered their escape and set them on a path to citizenship (The New York Times Book Review). ​ In late 2006, Saket Soni...

The first indication of the prolonged terror that followed the 1906 earthquake occurred when a ship steaming off San Francisco's Golden Gate "seemed to jump clear out of the water." This gripping account of the earthquake, the devastating firestorms that followed, and the city's subsequent reconstruction vividly shows how, after the shaking stopped, humans, not the forces of nature, nearly destroyed San Francisco in a remarkable display of simple ineptitude and power politics.

On June 23, 2000, the iron-ore carrier MV Treasure, en route from Brazil to China, foundered off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, spilling 1,300 tons of oil into the ocean and contaminating the habitat of 75,000 penguins. Realizing that 41 percent of the world's population of African penguins could perish, local conservation officials immediately launched a massive rescue operation.

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. Yet those wind-torn hours represented only the first stage of the relentless triple tragedy that Katrina brought to the entire Gulf Coast from Louisiana...

The final audiobook in the hilarious and anarchic Roman Garstang Disaster series. Incredibly, unbelievably, Roman's cousin is marrying the cousin of Rosie Taylor (aka The Worst Person Who Ever Lived). Roman can't believe this (as Rosie says, 'How can we be in the same family? We're barely in the same species.'). Rosie's parents decide they should go along together and 'make a weekend of it'.

A practical guide to self-sufficient and sustainable living from the star of Homestead Rescue. Do you wish for a more resilient, sustainable, and empowered way of providing for your family in uncertain times? Are you worried about unreliable power grids, uncertain water supplies, or overly...

Whitney Balliett's magnificent essay on the Great Hurricane of 1938 appeared in The New Yorker fifty years after the event.

The unbelievable true story of one of the strangest disasters in history—part of the New York Times bestselling What Was? series, featuring 16 pages of photos. On an unusually warm winter day in Boston, Massachusetts, a storage tank in the city's North End burst, flooding the neighborhood with...