BY GARY KRIST
Saturday, January 27, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
1. "The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, 1968).
Arguably the work that launched the modern disaster genre, this account of the Great Johnstown Flood of May 31, 1889, still sets the standard for colorful, well-researched historical nonfiction. It was historian David McCullough's first book, but his trademark atmospheric style of narration is already in full bloom, evident in his rich portrayal of the proletarian steel town that had the misfortune of being located a few miles downstream from "the most exclusive resort in America." The South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, where the likes of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick spent their vacations, knew how to pamper millionaires, but it wasn't too careful about maintaining the earthen dam that supported its boating lake. The dam's collapse in a heavy storm sent a huge wall of water roaring down the valley toward Johnstown, ultimately killing more than 2,000 mostly working-class residents. McCullough turns this calamity into a subtle morality tale, showing how it foreshadowed the class conflicts that were later to bring the Gilded Age to a tumultuous close.
2. "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking, 2000).
Drawing on the true story behind Melville's "Moby-Dick," Nathaniel Philbrick describes one of the most unnatural of natural disasters: an 1820 incident in which the Nantucket-based whaleship Essex was literally "stove by a whale." The reason for the assault remains obscure ("Never before," Philbrick writes, "had a whale been known to attack a ship"), but its consequences were dire. The Essex sank rapidly, leaving its crew of 20 men adrift some 3,000 miles off the coast of South America. Philbrick is a master of the unobtrusive digression, pausing for quick asides on whaling history or the physiology of extreme dehydration without breaking the dramatic tension. Most haunting moment: when four desperate men on one of the lifeboats run out of food and begin eyeing each other, thinking "horrid thoughts."
3. "Isaac's Storm" by Erik Larson (Crown, 1999).
No one ever remembered a nice day," Erik Larson observes wryly in this classic of the disaster genre. Needless to say, everyone--at least everyone in Galveston, Texas--remembered Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900. "Storm of the century" is a term tossed around with absurd regularity, but the hurricane that hit the Texas coast that day was the genuine article. Larson's chronicle of its devastating effects--the storm killed at least 6,000 people in Galveston alone--is nothing if not thorough; he even reports on the hurricane's birth as "an awakening of molecules" somewhere in the African highlands. But he gives the story a center by focusing on a single character: Isaac Cline, head of the local U.S. Weather Bureau office. Admittedly, Cline does come off as something of a stiff bureaucrat in the book, but he earns enough of our sympathy to give his own grave personal loss in the storm real emotional weight.
4. "Krakatoa" by Simon Winchester (HarperCollins, 2003).
This potpourri of a disaster book is not for readers seeking instant gratification: The notorious volcano of its title doesn't even begin to rumble until about page 150. And while some may find Simon Winchester's long background discussions (of everything from plate tectonics to Pliny the Elder) more impressive than interesting, I myself gladly follow wherever his erudition leads. This report on the explosion of an entire Indonesian island in August 1883 (said to be the loudest sound in modern recorded history) does meander, but it's packed with fascinating arcana. Unforgettable moment: when, months after the eruption and thousands of miles away, schoolboys playing on a beach in Zanzibar discover floating hunks of pumice embedded with human skulls and bone fragments.
5. The Holy Bible, King James version (1611).
A world-wide flood, a plague of locusts, a river whose waters turn to blood--when it comes to disaster scenarios, the Bible is hard to top. True, the Good Book's reliability is subject to some debate, but there are natural explanations for just about everything in it. (The Nile, for instance, did occasionally turn red, from contamination by volcanic deposits in the water from Ethiopia combined with decaying algae from the swamps of Sudan.) The prose in the King James version, moreover, can be quite evocative, as in this description of Noah's flood: "The same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." This is natural disaster viewed through the prism of faith. But Mother Nature at her most ill-tempered has nothing on the Book of Revelation, when the seals of the scroll are broken and those Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride out.
Mr. Krist is the author of five books of fiction. His first nonfiction work, "The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche" (Holt), will be published early next month.
