NIGHTLY READING THREAD: Welcome to Edition #24 of #GMGreads. Every night through this weird time, I'm tweeting out a list of my five favorite books around a general theme—and a link to an indie bookstore where you can order them online....
I wrote a piece for @POLITICOMag this week about the challenges of confronting COVID-19 with the myriad vacancies in the US government right now, which got me thinking about books about the links between humans and disasters—both natural and man-made: politico.com/news/magazine/…
1) Two books on the human causes behind urban disasters: @joe_flood's THE FIRES traces the misunderstood algorithm that burned the South Bronx in the 1970s powells.com/book/-97815944… and @EricKlinenberg's HEAT WAVE is about the 1995 Chicago heat wave: bookshop.org/books/heat-wav…
2) Everyone right now seems to be reading John Barry's history of the Spanish Flu, GREAT INFLUENZA (which I've never actually read) but I was amazed by his book on the '27 Mississippi flood, RISING TIDE: bookshop.org/books/rising-t…
3) Similarly, while many of you have probably read Daniel James Brown's BOYS IN THE BOAT (which I've also never read!) he also wrote an impressive—and at times disturbingly graphic!—history of a massive 1894 Minnesota firestorm, UNDER A FLAMING SKY: bookshop.org/books/under-a-…
4) One of David McCullough's earliest books was the story of the JOHNSTOWN FLOOD, one of the great preventable tragedies of the Gilded Age: bookshop.org/books/the-john…
5) Simon Winchester's CRACK IN THE EDGE OF THE WORLD explores the California earthquake of 1906 and what it taught us about the geology and fragility of the west: bookshop.org/books/a-crack-…
Those are tonight's #GMGreads. What are your favorite books about natural disasters? #avidreadersunite
