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Daniel James Brown

• Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894 – This story is fast-paced, gripping, and horrific.

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Michael D. Coe

• The Maya, Seventh Edition (Ancient Peoples and Places) – A fascinating overview of the mysterious Central American people and their doomed civilization, written by one of the primary researchers.

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Jared Diamond

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – A powerful and fresh insight into 13,000 years of human history.
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed – Another insightful study, full of cautionary lessons we must heed.

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Erik Larson

Larson will transport you back in time to another place and another way of life.

• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America – This book transports you back to the World’s Fair of 1893 and the sinister murderer who preyed there.
• Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History – Galveston, Texas was destroyed by a hurricane in 1900. Larson’s dispassionate account shows the crucial mistakes that cost so many so much.
• Thunderstruck – Larson links Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless telegraphy, with Hawley Crippen, a mild-mannered homeopathic doctor in turn-of-the-century London. You will wonder at the connection until the climax.

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Susan Orlean

• The Library Book – The burning of the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986 is only part of this wonderful, thoughtful look at one of our great public institutions.

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Marc Reisner

• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition – The outrageous story of the West’s most precious and overutilized resource.

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Stephen M. Silverman & Ralph D. Silver

• The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America  – great history of the Borscht Belt region in New York State

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Simon Winchester

Winchester is delightfully detailed in his tales of past disasters, scientific discovery. Catch these in audio form with him narrating if you can, for his delightful accent and diction. He has also authored several travelogues.

• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary – Who would think that the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary could be so intriguing? Or that it could make you cry?
• Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 – This is a terrific tale of disaster, richly intermixed with history, geography, and earth science.
• A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 – Another ripping mix of disaster and earth science.

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