The most recommended natural disaster books

As a narrative inquiry researcher, I study stories of people who have experienced a shared phenomenon, such as workplace bullying, sexual assault, or a natural disaster. Almost without exception, the initial plotlines are ones of devastation.

Over the years, I have attempted to come to a deeper understanding of where the hurt resides. Cohen answers that question, documenting for the reader how our desire to be a contributing member of a community is at the center of our striving, and how the surest way to wound another is by pushing them outside the inner circle. The cruelest of all acts is to revoke someone’s belonging to their community, and more tragically, themselves.

In Cohen’s masterful book, he shares stories and details the research on why our need to belong is an essential ingredient of being human and offers the reader fruitful ways to form more meaningful connections. 

This is a wonderful story whose main character has Down’s Syndrome, but it’s not a book about a child with Down’s Syndrome. The focus instead is on Adam’s kindness, his helpfulness, his positive attitude, and his community’s willingness to value him as a respected member. I absolutely love the sense of community inclusion found in this story.

This book is told in first-person from the perspective of Dunleavy, a pretty judgmental young woman who is not happy to be partnered with the infamous Shintaro Tarish. She's stubborn, inexperienced, naive, a little full of herself, cold, overly logical, and has little to no emotional intelligence. She also takes everything in stride, has an incredible dry wit, and is genuinely caring.

She's the type of character who will make you feel so many emotions, because she's so real she leaps off the page. There were times when I audibly groaned because Dunleavy's actions were just so terribly frustrating. I was delighted by her and her slow-burn friendship with Shintaro, made so tantalizing because Dunleavy can be so terrible to him sometimes!  

I was so intrigued by Becky and her story that she became one of my case studies in my book. She has been through more traumatic transitions than most of us have in a lifetime. From her own experience and struggle, Becky has crafted a masterful model for sustaining and stabilizing our lives. 

She created the Four C’s as a foundation: comfort, control, community, and connection. I refer to her work as another guiding source when life becomes crazy…as indeed it will. From a place of feeling stabilized, Becky advocates a resilient response: how do you understand and use the experience? What assumption will offer support? And what resources do you have? I can and should refer to her book often for my own stabilizing.

I appreciate the gentle way Ellen Leventhal empowers children in this picture book—showing even the youngest child can do small things to help others. Charlotte, the main character, her parents, and her toy bear arrive at the shelter after evacuating their home because of flooding. Charlotte watches people at the shelter and in the community share acts of kindness with the flood victims. Even though she is sad and upset, she follows their example. When Charlotte sees a younger child crying because his teddy was lost in the flood, she gives her stuffie to the little boy. It reminds me of how attached my two-year-old grandson is to his teddy bear. These small gestures shine a light of healing and hope during a natural disaster. 

When you study the long arc of history you begin to suspect that apocalypses aren't just inevitable, they're common. And so is survival, which is a really heartening thought. Human beings are crazily adaptable, and our ability to come together in communities (ideally, when we're at our best, which granted isn't always and is hard to see sometimes) will aid our survival. Annalee Newitz tells us how this is has happened before, and how it can happen again.

This book describes the myriad of hazards possibly impacting blue-water sailors and casual beachcombers. Using real-life examples, Gary explains the natural processes, events, and creatures, why and where they may occur, and what should or shouldn’t concern us to provide a clearer understanding of how oceans behave. 

My greatest fear is being caught in a landfalling tsunami; I stayed at a little village near sea level on one of the Phi Phi Islands in Thailand that was destroyed by the Great Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004—timing is everything in life, or hopefully, I would have followed the elephants who headed to high ground before these huge waves came ashore.

Gary’s book covers this great calamity but also explains the more common occurrences and hazards of rip currents, rogue waves, and hurricanes.   

Back when people understood hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters as literally being "acts of God," they sensibly concluded that human intervention could not prevent them. Yet that language—and its wide-ranging implications for public policy—has persisted, even as scientists have come to understand the physical causes of disasters and, increasingly, to believe that no disaster is wholly "natural." Ted Steinberg shows how government and corporate leaders' perpetuation of the idea of disasters as "natural" or even divinely ordained helps them to evade responsibility and avoid meaningful policy changes that might prevent future catastrophes. (Ripped from the headlines, climate change denial is a prime example!) Gripping case studies of famous disasters like the Chicago Fire and the San Francisco earthquake make this serious book a compelling read.

This book captured me from start to finish. Like my book, this story is told in a gripping journal format. A meteor knocks the moon off its orbit and this causes catastrophic consequences on earth. Summer turns to a bitterly cold winter and Miranda and her two brothers and mother must figure out how they will survive in such harsh conditions. Having enough food to survive is a constant concern. This book helps us realize that when things get really awful, all that matters is food, water, staying warm, and remaining together as a family. All other concerns fall away. 

This powerful, emotional book explores depression, first love, queerness, and connection against the backdrop of a catastrophic, world-ending event to come.

On the day the main character plans to end her life, instead she discovers that the entire earth only has a short time left to live. And so she moves toward the people she loves instead of away, wrestling with deeply relatable feelings of failure, loneliness, unworthiness, and disconnection. 

I cried multiple times and wanted to hold every character close.