October HistoryCAT: Disasters!

Our theme for October is disasters. There are lots of types to choose from, and plenty of books for each. As samples, I offer you one non-fiction and one fiction for each disaster.

Avalanche, earthquake, blizzard...


...hazardous material spills, dust storm, bioterrorism...


...flood, drought, heat wave...


...volcano, tornado, tsunami...


...nuclear accident, fire (urban), and fire (forest/wild).


But lest you think the news is all bad, let's remember that there are people who work in various ways to respond to disasters. Their efforts are part of the disaster story, too:



If you'd like to add your book to the wiki, you'll find it here.

Looking forward to this one! (Though I'm also currently reading one that would fit - for this month's RandomKIT. (It is one mentioned above Fire Weather / John Vaillant.)

That being said, I can't imagine I don't have something else on the tbr...

...that should say HistoryCAT in the thread title, shouldn't it?...

>3 KeithChaffee: I think Christina can change the title!

I had planned to read a book about the Titanic, but after seeing your examples I'm not entirely sure it fits?

Sure, a shipwreck is a disaster! I’m sure there are lots of types of disasters I didn’t mention.

>5 KeithChaffee: Thanks for the reply! I'll be reading The Pitkin Guide to Titanic then.

...shipwreck, landslide, plane crash, building collapse... the list goes on and on and on!

I plan to read Krakatoa : the day the world exploded, August 27, 1883. I have also pulled North Carolina's Hurricane History to read for this month's RandomKit, but given that I had to drop everything because my hold on Demon Copperhead--which I have to read for my RL book club for October--came in unexpectedly a month early, I may not get that one finished this month. So I may count both books for Disasters in October.

I had started reading Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson, but think I will put of finishing it (over half way to go) until October.

>7 KeithChaffee: - You had me chuckling. I'm not sure I'll get to anything this month, but my husband loves disaster books - especially ship and plane disasters.

I will try to read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer about the Mt. Everest disaster.

I am going to read The Woman In The Photo, about the Johnstown dam disaster.

>3 KeithChaffee: >4 MissBrangwen: Yup, I changed it!

>13 christina_reads: Thank you!

I loved Into Thin Air and The Children's Blizzard. And Erik Larson is a great author; Isaac's Storm is a book I recommend.

I read Chicago's Great Fire by Carl Smith.

I've read Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson.

>17 sallylou61: I read that, too, and there were some images that just stayed with me.

I have set up the 2025 group here: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/24518/2025-Category-Challenge. Feel free to stop by anytime, start suggesting CATs and KITs, and post your threads for the 2025 challenge!

(I'm posting this notification to a bunch of threads, so sorry if you see it multiple times!)

I stumbled across a kids' book, 100 Disasters That Shaped World History, while I was looking for a book on the Chicago Fire, and it was just so on-the-nose as a match for this category that I had to pick it up from the library and read it. It made me feel a bit elderly because more than half of the disasters described took place after I was born in 1971, though only one of those was one I lived through as opposed to being alive during, namely the March 1993 Storm of the Century along the US East Coast.

I read In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor. It's about the Johnstown Flood of 1889.

I finally finished North Carolina's Hurricane History. I had some interruptions while reading this book, but the interruptions were actually somewhat necessary, as this isn't a book that is really designed to be read straight through; at least, I could not read it that way. There's just too much in the way of factual detail and it's too much to take in all at once. But it is probably as complete a history of hurricanes in NC that could be given, up to the time the book was published. For a lot of people, it might be more useful as a reference than something to read straight through. But it has a lot of really good information.

I'm still hoping to get to Krakatoa : the day the world exploded, August 27, 1883 for this challenge.

I messed up when finding a book for this one. I wrote down the topics for my various CATs and KITs to plan for) and got this one mixed up with something else. I did find one, but given that I was trying to "hurry" to pick something, I've ended up with an audio by someone whose audios I've not been happy with in the past, and it's looking that way again.

He reads his own books, and I just can't seem to focus on him when he reads his books. Oddly, I think of all three (this is the third) I've read by him, all have been audios. It does appear that that's what my library carries for him - the audio books. (I usually only check for print (I didn't check) if they don't have an ebook or audio... but now with my library having a recent ransomware attack, what they have on Overdrive really are my only options for a while, anyway.)

I read Dead Mountain by Donnie Eichar, about the Dyatlov Pass incident, wherein nine experienced, healthy young hikers in 1959 Russia inexplicably abandoned their tent half-dressed on a cold February night and promptly died either of hypothermia or by falling off a cliff in the dark. It's spawned a bajillion conspiracy theories, but Eichar comes up with a natural cause theory, albeit an unusual one that I thought could explain one or two people fleeing the tent, but not all nine at once (infrasound caused by high winds). He wrote it 11 years ago; apparently later investigations favor an avalanche, which Eichar discounted due to the relatively mild slope of the site, but to me makes much more sense.

I have finished Cinco días de Octubre where the disaster is Spain's Civil War. We are in 1948, and former police officer Miquel Mascarell has been released from forced labour and is more or less blackmailed by a Falangista into finding the body of his nephew, killed and interred in an unknown spot during the first days of fighting.

I just finished
Sinking the Sultana: A Civil War Story of Imprisonment, Greed, and a Doomed Journey Home
by Sally Walkerd

My husband's great-great grandfather was a survivor of the Sultana.

A Crack in the Edge of the World / Simon Winchester
2.25 stars

This is a “story” of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which spawned fires, which destroyed the city. It also talks about geology, in general, in order to explain earthquakes. Winchester also goes through a history leading up to the San Francisco quake.

I listened to the audio because it’s what my library had available. I knew it was probably a bad choice, as I’ve not enjoyed Winchester’s books in the past via audio. I feel like I should like them (based on the topics), but I really would be better off to try them in print. This one got (slightly) more interesting toward the end, as he focused more on San Francisco in 1906, rather than the science/geology, in general. I am not opposed to reading about science, so I don’t necessarily think that’s the issue. I’m not sure if I don’t like his writing style, or if it’s the audios, in particular (read by Winchester, himself), that I am not a fan of.

>25 susanna.fraser: >27 nrmay: I have never heard about these incidents before, so I definitely learned something from this thread!

I read The Pitkin Guide to Titanic by Roger Cartwright.