Here are 90 books that The Johnstown Flood fans have personally recommended if you like
The Johnstown Flood.
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I am a New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. My works have been published globally in more than fifteen languages. I hold a PhD from the University of Oxford, served as an officer in the Canadian and British Armies, and have appeared in numerous documentaries, television programs, and podcasts. I am an associate professor of history (and, as a true Canadian, head coach of the hockey team) at Colorado Mesa University.
This book brought the shamefully neglected field of Indigenous studies to a general audience through a compelling and readable narrative. As someone passionate (and teaches and writes) about this topic, it makes my list for changing the landscapes of our collective understanding of Indigenous peoples and their proud histories, cultures, traditions, and contributions.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (The New York Times Book Review).
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized…
I am an unusual scientist in the sense that I have doctorates in both biology and anthropology, so I am very interested in the dichotomy between what our bodies truly want (biology) and how we are supposed to behave, or tell others to behave, in our cultural settings (cultural anthropology). Amazingly, studies show that we spend more time and attention in our lives living for others for what they think of us, than doing what we truly want, and that we often regret that, when we are close to dying. These books make us reconsider that way of living, so we can change this before it is too late.
This book was written by a biologist with a profound knowledge of the natural world, including our species. It is one of the best books written by a scientist. It combines biology, anthropology, and history to explain a lot about where we came from and why some countries are wealthier than others, rooting such discussions on biology.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China,…
As a child I read and experienced history books as adventures. Adventure drew me to Alaska after a hitch in the Navy. I wanted to write an accurate historical novel about Juneau and the Treadwell Mine and began my research. I knew the Alaska Historical Library was the perfect place to begin. When I discovered the extensive photo collections, I flashed back to my admiration of the historical novels that impressed me. I borrowed technique and structure from all and incorporated imagery in my manuscript. My main goal was to successfully immerse the reader in a good novel about 1915 in Alaska Territory.
Dead Wake is fact that reads like fiction. Not often do I choose a book already knowing how it ends. His artistic rendering of the world in 1915 is alone worth the read. He introduces us to the passengers of the SS Lusitania, who they are, why they are on the ship, and he makes us care.
Larson limns Captains Turner of the Lusitania, and Schweiger of theU-20, the Imperial German submarine. The author carefully choreographs the final voyage of the doomed ship. The sinking is not the end of the story.
The last third of the book is devoted to what happened after the torpedo hit. Captain Turner survives the attack as well as many of the passengers. This is a beautifully researched, but heartrending read.
On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era's great transatlantic "Greyhounds" and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. He knew, moreover,…
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
Being a connoisseur of historical nonfiction and a survivor of the 1994 shooting spree and aviation disaster at Fairchild Air Force Base, allowed me to create a unique narrative of the two tragedies. I’ve been naturally curious since childhood and grew even more observant and detail-oriented during my career in law enforcement and criminal investigations. I appreciate books that delve into historical disasters and tragedies giving us the opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences. When I realized none of my favorite authors were writing about the Fairchild tragedies, I took up the challenge myself. Warnings Unheeded is the result of more than seven years of research, it is an incredible story and a timeless lesson from history.
Delivered from Evil covers ten incidents of mass murder and serial killing. In each well-written narrative, Franscell tells the story of the crime, the criminal, and the victims. Even the most devoted crime buff will learn something new from Franscell’s thorough research and unique style. I appreciate the attention he gives to the survivor’s stories and their experience with the life-altering effects of trauma.
Written by bestselling crime author, Ron Franscell, Delivered from Evil is a compelling look at the most notable mass murders told from the harrowing perspective of those who escaped certain death. Using survivor's accounts, many of which have never been told until now, the crime and its aftermath are laid out in chilling detail. * Suzanna Gratia Hupp watches as her parents are gunned down in the Luby's Cafeteria shooting massacre-while 100 feet away is the handgun Suzanna left in her car. * Dianne Alexander is brutally assaulted and left for dead by serial killer Derrick Todd Lee-but survives to…
I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.
The extreme length ofFall and Rise put me off until my agent Matthew Hamilton persuaded me to take the plunge.
Just as he’d promised, I found myself deeply engaged in the lives and ultimate fates of Mitchell Zuckoff’s large cast of real-life characters, whose personalities, back-stories, and ambitions are rendered with impressive immediacy.
Of course we already know the outcome of this tragic story, yet the book possesses remarkable narrative dynamism. Hovering over most of its pages is the unnerving question, “Which of these people will survive?”
'The farewell calls from the planes... the mounting terror of air traffic control... the mothers who knew they were witnessing their loved ones perish... From an author who's spent 5 years reconstructing its horror, never has the story been told with such devastating, human force' Daily Mail
This is a 9/11 book like no other. Masterfully weaving together multiple strands of the events in New York, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Fall and Rise is a mesmerising, minute-by-minute account of that terrible day.
In the days and months after 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff, then…
Being a connoisseur of historical nonfiction and a survivor of the 1994 shooting spree and aviation disaster at Fairchild Air Force Base, allowed me to create a unique narrative of the two tragedies. I’ve been naturally curious since childhood and grew even more observant and detail-oriented during my career in law enforcement and criminal investigations. I appreciate books that delve into historical disasters and tragedies giving us the opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences. When I realized none of my favorite authors were writing about the Fairchild tragedies, I took up the challenge myself. Warnings Unheeded is the result of more than seven years of research, it is an incredible story and a timeless lesson from history.
My first Gregg Olsen book, Starvation Heights, told the story of a serial-killing “doctor” who operated in the area of my hometown in the early 1900s. The Deep Dark, tells the story of the 1972 northern Idaho silver-mine disaster that occurred not far from my current home. After exhaustive research and interviews with survivors, Olsen thoroughly conveys the lifestyle of a hard-rock miner, working under the constant threat of death thousands of feet underground. Along the way, Olsen lays out the chain of events that led to the worst disaster in Idaho’s history.
“A vividly detailed, heartbreaking tale about a dark, alien place, the people who loved working there and a town that has never been the same. He brings to life the hot, dirty, treasure-hunt environment where danger was a miner's heroin." —Seattle Times
“Investigation at its best.” —Tucson Citizen
On May 2, 1972, 174 miners entered Sunshine Mine in Kellogg, Idaho, on their daily quest for silver. From his office window, safety engineer Bob Launhardt could see the air shafts that fed fresh air into the mine, which was more than a mile below the surface. Sunshine was a fireproof hardrock…
I’ve always been a bit of a history nerd. Memories of my childhood are sprinkled with reminders of this passion. Whether it was holding in my excitement to be on the way to fourth-grade social studies so my classmates wouldn’t think I was weird or watching a Nat Geo documentary about the archeology of Stonehenge while I healed up from wisdom teeth surgery, history has always been an escape and fascination for me. This passion led to me obtaining a BA, then an MA in History, and starting my own history blog.
A little over three decades after writing The Johnstown Flood, McCullough used his uncanny ability to connect with history subjects to create the best biography of John Adams ever written.
Titling it simplyJohn Adams, McCullough walks readers through the life of one of America’s greatest revolutionaries and second president. With this book, McCullough takes Adams out of his vaunted place in the American pantheon of patriots and brings him back down to earth.
We get to know the world and family into which John was born in 18th-century Massachusetts. We learn how his humble beginnings as a farmer’s son and the Protestant work ethic that still permeated New England during his youth forged him into a tenaciously hard worker.
But Boston was not yet the metropolis it is today, and this small colonial city could not hold Adams’ ambitions for long.
His first book since Truman, from one of America's most distinguished and popular biographers. Destined for the same kind of sweeping success as his Pulitzer Prize-winning Truman, John Adams is a powerful, deeply moving biography that reads like an epic historical novel. Breathing fresh life into American history, it takes as its subject the extraordinary man who became the second president of the United States. A man whose adventurous life and spirited rivalry with Thomas Jefferson encompasses both the American Revolution and the birth of the young republic. Deftly written with a brilliant eye for detail, McCullough describes the childhood,…
I’ve always been a bit of a history nerd. Memories of my childhood are sprinkled with reminders of this passion. Whether it was holding in my excitement to be on the way to fourth-grade social studies so my classmates wouldn’t think I was weird or watching a Nat Geo documentary about the archeology of Stonehenge while I healed up from wisdom teeth surgery, history has always been an escape and fascination for me. This passion led to me obtaining a BA, then an MA in History, and starting my own history blog.
While this is a rather scholarly book with a bit of an intimidating title, I was surprised by how enjoyable of a read it was.
Through this work, Woolf explores what it meant to be a native to Gaul, the traumatic experience of the Roman conquest (estimates of Gaulish deaths are in the millions), and how the Gauls and Romans shaped the culture of the region moving forward.
With expert skill, Woolf shows that the process of romanization in Gaul was not just a case of Roman forcing the Gauls to act Roman or the Gauls imitating Roman ways to placate their new overlords. Instead, it was a process of cultural give-and-take, in which both sides took on aspects of the other.
This book is a study of the process conventionally termed 'Romanization' through an investigation of the experience of Rome's Gallic provinces in the late Republic and early empire. Beginning with a rejection of the concept of 'Romanization' it describes the nature of Roman power in Gaul and the Romans' own understanding of these changes. Successive chapters then map the chronology and geography of change and offer new interpretations of urbanism, rural civilization, consumption and cult, before concluding with a synoptic view of Gallo-Roman civilization and of the origins of provincial cultures in general. The work draws on literary and archaeological…
As a child in New England, I climbed over stone walls wondering about the lives of those who built them. I devoured biographies and historical fiction, but I never imagined that I'd become a writer of such books for kids 8-14. First, I became a social studies teacher and, later, a librarian. I wanted my students to read about honorable characters striving to make the best of difficult but often little-known, historical situations. I demanded reliable details, a challenging conflict, and a resolution filled with hope for a better future. That is now my goal as a writer of children's books – and as a reader. These books meet those high standards. Enjoy!
What an exciting tale! I've done lots of research about life on the American frontier during the Revolutionary War, but Gary Paulsen provided information that was new to me about British attacks on small frontier villages and prison ships anchored in New York Harbor. I couldn't stop reading. The author alternated the fiction story with nonfiction segments providing further explanation. Rather than interrupt the reading, they enhanced it, elevating the excitement I felt as Samuel searched for his missing parents.
Samuel, 13, spends his days in the forest, hunting for food for his family. He has grown up on the frontier of a British colony, America. Far from any town, or news of the war against the King that American patriots have begun near Boston.
But the war comes to them. British soldiers and Iroquois attack. Samuel’s parents are taken away, prisoners. Samuel follows, hiding, moving silently, determined to find a way to rescue them. Each day he confronts the enemy, and the tragedy and horror of this war. But he also discovers allies, men and women working secretly for…
David DeKok became interested in environmental disasters in his native Michigan in 1974, when PBB, a fire-retardant chemical, was accidentally mixed with animal feed, entered the food chain, and then most people in the state, probably including himself. As a journalist in Pennsylvania, he wrote extensively about the Centralia mine fire and the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and is the author of four books. He tends to write about small towns and small-town people in crisis.
While this is not a comprehensive history of the TMI accident and its aftermath—none exists––you can happily read this book and understand the seriousness of what happened. It is not encumbered with anti-nuclear ideology, like some of the books written immediately after the accident were. It has many photos, a glossary of nuclear terms, and an index.
It was 5 a.m. at the nuclear power plant on an island in the middle of the Susquehanna River. Suddenly an alarm shrieked. Something was going wrong inside the plant. Within minutes human error and technical failure triggered the worst nuclear power accident in the United States and within hours, the eyes of the world were on Three Mile Island. Wilborn Hampton transports the readers to this pivotal moment in American history, telling the hour-by-hour story of covering the nuclear accident as a U.P.I. (United Press International) reporter. His fascinating account will compel readers to consider one of the most…
