I pride myself on my independence and sense of adventure. I started traveling the world with my family when I was 3 and I haven’t stopped since. When you travel, you have to cope with new situations on a daily basis and navigate different obstacles to meet your needs. An interest in adventure and how people cope with new situations are the biggest reasons why I have a passion for books dealing with overcoming obstacles. Before I retired to Spain, I was a teacher of students between 10 and 15 years old. I chose two of the books I recommended to read to my students when I was a teacher.
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.
New York Times bestseller! A heart-stopping post-apocalyptic thriller that's "absorbing from first to last page."*
When a meteor knocks the moon closer to earth, Miranda, a high school sophomore, takes shelter with her family.
Told in a year’s worth of journal entries, Life as We Knew It chronicles the human struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world.
As August turns dark and wintery in northeastern Pennsylvania, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited…
As intense as the Cold War was, I have always found myself looking toward the future. Nuclear annihilation was a real possibility in my youth. Even so, I have always been curious about the next threat beyond our current crisis would be. Beyond nuclear, biological, and chemical threats, I see that we now face possible dangers from rogue AI and climate change. If that’s not enough, let’s remember that conventional weapons are getting more powerful with the passing of each decade. That’s why the storyteller in me loves this stuff so much.
This story reads much differently to me than any other war novel. The fact that it begins with a series of devastating natural disasters grabbed my attention. I like stories that have a twist. In this book, I enjoyed that it changed from an apocalypse story to one about an invasion, then blended the two to make something unusual.
A 9.0 earthquake… A massive tsunami… the eruption of Mt. Rainier…
…All lead to the total annihilation of all infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest.
In Slaughter County, gun club manager Phil Walker leads an impromptu band of people, working together for mutual safety and survival. Meanwhile, his son Crane is but one of hundreds at a nearby naval shipyard, working feverishly for days on-end to avert nuclear disaster.
As unprepared survivors must adapt on the fly, unlikely alliances form—and the dregs of society begin to make their moves in a new world without law and order. The best and worst…
I‘m a Sydney-based exploration geologist and science writer, travelling the world in search of gold, exotic metals, gemstones, and the stories they have to tell — writing is my tool to bring alive ideas and concepts important to me, and my popular books include Rocks, Fossils and Dinosaurs;Natural Disasters; and Geologica. Working in the world's poorest regions has also sparked a strong humanitarian interest. I'm the founding president of FreeSchools World Literacy – Australia, a charity dedicated to education of underprivileged children, and towards which earnings from my writing go. It is my belief that education for all, not just a privileged few, is key to solving the world's problems.
Earthquakes and Volcanoes is another one of the fabulous Reader’s Digest Pathfinders series specifically for kids. It features scientists at work measuring the temperature of red-hot lava, destructive earthquakes, and monstrous tsunamis bearing down on coastal ports. The cause of all of these is simply explained in the context of our planet’s shifting plate tectonic motor. The book’s author, Dr. Lin Sutherland, gave me a great helping hand during my Ph.D. degree at Macquarie University by organizing access to state-of-the-art uranium-lead age dating equipment for my sapphire samples. We became firm friends and colleagues after that, going on together to publish numerous research articles on sapphires and rubies.
Stimulating text, multi-layered illustrations, and hands-on activities present information about earthquakes and volcanoes, including notable examples in history, in the latest addition to a nonfiction science series. Teacher's Guide available.
I am an author who believes stories must first entertain and thrill if they are ever to instill something powerful and unforgettable. While I would love to sit here and compile books that laud the values I believe in, that’s just not how it works. Action is the best way to convey theme – and these examples celebrate the storytelling techniques I stand by. I love ass-kickers, in literature and in life. And I hope one day to be remembered as one of them.
This author has a talent for using just a hint of magic to flirt with the reader in an otherwise rural, modern, realistic environment. Okay, okay, there may not be machine guns of ass-kicking in this novel, but there is an ass-kicking female lead who renders an Oscar-worthy performance of compelling the story forward. If you want a feisty book with a little less guts spilled (maybe…), this is my recommendation. Although I read this book long ago, I’m always drawn back into it the second I reopen to page one, like a tsunami of nostalgia wrapped in a sheet of music. Maybe on a pillow of bear fur. (Seriously, just read it).
Dani’s met two new friends this summer: bad boy Eli, and a big black bear. She doesn’t know which one is more dangerous….
Dani Moser is a fifteen-year-old girl who dreams of being a blues guitarist and singer like her hero, Janis Joplin. When her dad takes Dani and her annoying little brother to his hometown for the summer—a tiny little town in the Arkansas Ozarks—she thinks she’s in for the most boring summer of her life.
She didn’t expect she would meet a small-town bad boy named Eli, and join his bluegrass band. She didn’t expect she’d get in…
My father wanted to be an astrophysicist, and as a kid I caught his passion for the future from the many science fiction books he’d left throughout our house. As an adult, the advances in technology have brought the future envisioned in those books closer than ever. My passion for what awaits us led me to write The Price of Safety, which contains innovations that are right around the corner—and have already started to come true (which is freaky), between Elon Musk’s cranial implants to DNA tracking. The world we live in is becoming more like the world in my books. I hope we’re ready!
The oldest book on the list, Lucifer’s Hammer seems to be an end-of-the-world tale. And it is to a degree: the world is forever altered after a comet enters the earth’s atmosphere and breaks apart, the huge pieces slamming into the West Coast.
It’s the aftermath, though, where things get interesting. How do people survive? How much of their humanity survives with them? This is the story Niven and Pournelle tell, with a level of realism that echoes people’s attitudes and actions witnessed during the COVID pandemic.
With a clash between rival forces leading to a showdown that dictates the survivors’ future, Lucifer’s Hammer has continued to resonate with me years after reading it.
“The first satisfying end-of-the-world novel in years . . . an ultimate one . . . massively entertaining.”—Cleveland Plain-Dealer
The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization.
But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival—a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known.…
I’ve always loved how science deepens my appreciation of nature and fills me with awe and wonder. I’ve been a science teacher, a documentary producer for National Geographic and Discovery, and the author of What's Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner. I’m astounded by how much scientists have been able to learn about how our world works and how they have revealed surprising and strange beauty. Their stories of wrestling with the unknown, marked by unexpected twists and great perseverance, captivate and inspire me.
I love a seamless blend of science and history that creates a gripping story, and Krakatoa is at the top of my list. The book left me in awe at the power of nature.
The Krakatoa eruption unleashed a 120-foot tsunami, killed tens of thousands, and cast ash into the atmosphere that cooled temperatures around the globe. I was fascinated by Winchester’s tale of how the cataclysm contributed to our understanding of volcanology, tsunamis, and the revolutionary theory of plate tectonics.
To top it off, he took me into another world by weaving in a moving story of Dutch colonization and Indonesian resistance. I was sorry to reach the end.
'Bracingly apocalyptic stuff: atmospheric, chock-full of information and with a constantly escalating sense of pace and tension' Sunday Telegraph
Simon Winchester's brilliant chronicle of the destruction of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883 charts the birth of our modern world. He tells the story of the unrecognized genius who beat Darwin to the discovery of evolution; of Samuel Morse, his code and how rubber allowed the world to talk; of Alfred Wegener, the crack-pot German explorer and father of geology. In breathtaking detail he describes how one island and its inhabitants were blasted out of existence and how colonial…
As a teenager, I became fascinated by Japan – by the mysteries of Zen, the exotic atmosphere cooked up by its great novelists, the serene beauty of the countryside captured in old photographs. Then I moved to Tokyo and for eleven years was immersed in Japanese culture. It was like getting to know a complex human being, I went from bafflement and revulsion through fascination and infatuation, arriving at a degree of understanding and affection. I love Japan and feel I know it quite intimately. But the variety of books on my list give an idea of how many different ways this great, elusive civilization can be approached.
Northern Japan was struck by one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in 2011, followed by a disastrous tsunami in which thousands died. Lloyd Parry spent years visiting and interviewing the survivors, bringing back riveting accounts of what it means to have your life shattered by such a catastrophe and to live among the debris. These include one man’s description of being swallowed alive by the giant wave then spat out into the house of a relative which reads like a modern myth.
'The definitive book on the quake which killed more than 15,000 people.' Mail Online 'You will not read a finer work of narrative non-fiction this year.' Economist 'A breathtaking, extraordinary work of non-fiction.' Times Literary Supplement 'A future classic of disaster journalism.' Observer
On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of north-east Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,500 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned.
It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It…
As a teacher, I often talk with my students about current events and highlight how disasters can spiral. Wildfire seasons are worsening, storms are getting stronger, wars are starting and never-ending, and sometimes, my students express some despair in the face of such cycles. Though it’s not a cure-all for this anxiety, I encourage my students to try and create something from this existential worry. Rather than scrolling through all the bad things that cross our screens, creativity can help us imagine a better world to work towards. Poetry about disasters can help us see them through.
If there are two things I love, it’s persona poems and a sustained concept throughout a collection. Like Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith above, this book has both things.
A book of persona poems imagining the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan as a series of monsters battling against the 50 employees who remained on-site after the tsunami, the collection weaves seamlessly between languages and comic book-like sound effects that create a heroic narrative in a sparse style.
This collection is one I return to when I think of trying to combat apocalyptic despair; if 50 people can face down a fatal situation, then I can live through another, less catastrophic day.
Named a "Best Book of 2019" by the New York Public Library Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry Society of Midland Authors Honoree in Poetry
In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. Those who stayed at the plant to stabilize the reactors, willing to sacrifice their lives, became known internationally as the Fukushima 50.
In tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, Lee Ann Roripaugh takes a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart of the…
I have worked and lived at sea for months at a time, and I have many memories of the sea, good and bad. I have lived through extreme Alaskan storms, fished in remote coves, and worked beyond exhaustion over and over. Working at sea taught me some important lessons about life and the possibility of sudden death. I experienced the romance of the sea from a young age, and it has inspired my writing.
The suspense of this novel captured me right from the start and kept me involved to the end. The adventure of being trapped on an iceberg in such a terrible predicament was fully entertaining. I recommend this because it is the most suspenseful book I can recall reading, and at the same time it offers escapism into the extremities of the polar ice cap.
A widespread drought is causing murderous famine. There is one possible solution: Arctic ice could be moved south to parched coastlines and melted for water.
In an Arctic icefield, a special team of scientists has planted bombs that will detonate automatically at midnight to break away some of the ice. Before they withdraw to the safety of their base camp, a shattering tidal wave breaks loose the ice on which they are working. Now they are marooned on an iceberg during the worst winter storm of the decade. The bombs in the ice beneath them are buried irretrievably deep...and ticking.…
Both
hilarious and, at times, heartbreaking, this autobiographical account of a young
British doctor’s life on the hospital front lines is the best book in years
about what it’s really like to tend to patients truly in need as well as those
who merely think they are sick.
It was subsequently made into a BBC and
AMC television series and written by a real doctor who is now a comedian and
television writer.
The format is a series of diary entries that make you laugh,
cry, and feel as if you’re right there with the author in the emergency room
during his frequent, nearly 24-hour shifts.
A Major BBC Series Starring Ben Whishaw. The multi-million copy bestseller and Book of the Year at The National Book Awards.
'Painfully funny. The pain and the funniness somehow add up to something entirely good, entirely noble and entirely loveable.' - Stephen Fry
Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you.
Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS…
