My storm is worse than yours

[FSogol]

Just kidding. Attached is a reading list of great disasters:

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough
Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson
Blizzard!: The Storm That Changed America‎. by Jim Murphy
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry

Please rec some more.

[Neoma]

1. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

By Timothy Egan.

[SheilaT]

2. The Children's Blizzard

by David Laskin. It occurred in the upper Midwest in January of 1888, a couple of months before the Blizzard of '88 in NYC. It got it's name because the day it happened, that morning was unseasonably warm, and many children went off to school without coats. A few hours later the temperature dropped precipitously, and the snow started. Many children froze to death trying to get home.

Like Isaac's Storm, it tells about the early days of the National Weather Service.

Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History by Denise Gess and William Lutz. October 8, 1871 is remembered as the date of the Great Chicago Fire. On that same date, in the woods of Wisconsin, a terrible forest fire raged, and more than 2,000 people died, nearly ten times the death toll in Chicago.

[kag]

3. "The Town that Died"

I can't remember the author. It's about the explosion in the town of Halifax, Nova Scotia during WWII. I poured through it one summer. It's fascinating.

[SheilaT]

4. The Great Mortality by John Kelly.

Excellent. Among other things, I learned that Rome was so depopulated after the fall of the Roman Empire that even a thousand years later, when the Plague struck, the city had maybe half the population it'd had a millennium before.

He also has a brand new book out about the Potato Famine, called The Graves are Walking, which I have on reserve at my library. Can hardly wait to read it.

[FSogol]

5. Have you read, "The Great Shame" by Thomas Keneally?

He wrote Schindler's List. It is about the potato famine. Incredible book.

[SheilaT]

6. No, I haven't.

I'll have to see if my library has it.

I read Schindler's List around the time it first came out, and was enthralled.