Episode 910: A book featuring a man-made disaster 

episode 910 logo

Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at the prompt from the 2022 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

This week we look at books about man-made disasters. We have also looked at books on Natural Disasters, back in episode 405. Check out our show notes page for information on the resources we share this episode, links to the beverages we enjoy, and links to the books we discuss today.

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so you really get the feel for your reading! 

Check out this beverages from the Tipsy Bartender website:

BEAUTIFUL DISASTER

1 oz. (30ml) Pineapple Vodka

1 oz. (30ml) Pineapple Rum

1 oz. (30ml) Melon Liqueur

2 oz. (60ml) Lemon Lime Soda

2 oz. (60ml) Champagne

1 oz. (30ml) Blue Curaçao

Garnish: Kiwi, Blueberry

PREPARATION

1. In a shaking glass with ice, combine pineapple vodka, pineapple rum, and melon liqueur. Shake well.

2. Build a glass using ice cubes, kiwi slices, and blueberries.

3. Strain the mix over and add lemon lime soda.

4. In a shaking glass with ice, combine champagne and blue curaçao. Stir to mix.

5. Add crushed ice to the serving glass and pour the mix over.

6. Garnish with more blueberries and kiwi slices. 

From the website Burn Blog:

East Coast Hurricane Cocktail

1 ounce Myers’s dark rum

1 ounce light rum

1/2 ounce lime juice

3 ounces orange juice

3 ounces pineapple juice

1/2 ounce grenadine

Splash Bacardi 151

Pour all ingredients but the 151 in a highball glass over ice and stir. Top with Bacardi 151. Add extra shots as needed to match the categorical intensity of your particular hurricane.

Genre Discussion:

We have talked about natural disasters in our prior episode. This week we are going to talk about books with disasters that were caused by humans. These are generally sadder than the natural disasters, because when you read the books you keep wishing everyone involved would make different decisions that could avert the disaster. Some of these are big engineering disasters. Some are wars or police actions. Plane crashes, car crashes, factory fires – there are all kinds of disasters humans cause that you can read about this week. Some are huge-scale, affecting thousands of people; some are small scale, and only affect one or two. It doesn’t really matter the size – all are disasters. 

There are a lot of nonfiction books in this genre. And you can define disaster in a variety of ways that it will cover all kinds of fictional disasters across genres: romance, scifi, even cozy mysteries.There is a growing genre of climate change fiction, known as cli-fic, that will provide you with lots of choices this week. Sorry: not many positive, fun books to be found here. But we can always focus on figuring out how to avoid the next disaster!

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

Lifeboat 12, by Susan Hood [middle grade]

With Nazis bombing London every night, it’s time for thirteen-year-old Ken to escape. He suspects his stepmother is glad to see him go, but his dad says he’s one of the lucky ones—one of ninety boys and girls to ship out aboard the SS City of Benares to safety in Canada.

Life aboard the luxury ship is grand—nine-course meals, new friends, and a life far from the bombs, rations, and his stepmum’s glare. And after five days at sea, the ship’s officers announce that they’re out of danger.

They’re wrong.

Late that night, an explosion hurls Ken from his bunk. They’ve been hit. Torpedoed! The Benares is sinking fast. Terrified, Ken scrambles aboard Lifeboat 12 with five other boys. Will they get away? Will they survive?

Award-winning author Susan Hood brings this little-known World War II story to life in a riveting novel of courage, hope, and compassion. Based on true events and real people, Lifeboat 12 is about believing in one another, knowing that only by banding together will we have any chance to survive.

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, by Rebecca Solnit 

Why is it that in the aftermath of a disaster? whether manmade or natural?people suddenly become altruistic, resourceful, and brave? What makes the newfound communities and purpose many find in the ruins and crises after disaster so joyous? And what does this joy reveal about ordinarily unmet social desires and possibilities?

In A Paradise Built in Hell, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit explores these phenomena, looking at major calamities from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco through the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She examines how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as looking at the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis. This is a timely and important book from an acclaimed author whose work consistently locates unseen patterns and meanings in broad cultural histories.

FantasticLand, by Mike Bockoven (a novel)

Since the 1970s, FantasticLand has been the theme park where “Fun is Guaranteed!” But when a hurricane ravages the Florida coast and isolates the park, the employees find it anything but fun. Five weeks later, the authorities who rescue the survivors encounter a scene of horror. Photos soon emerge online of heads on spikes outside of rides and viscera and human bones littering the gift shops, breaking records for hits, views, likes, clicks, and shares. How could a group of survivors, mostly teenagers, commit such terrible acts?

Presented as a fact-finding investigation and a series of first-person interviews, FantasticLand pieces together the grisly series of events. Park policy was that the mostly college-aged employees surrender their electronic devices to preserve the authenticity of the FantasticLand experience. Cut off from the world and left on their own, the teenagers soon form rival tribes who viciously compete for food, medicine, social dominance, and even human flesh. This new social network divides the ravaged dreamland into territories ruled by the Pirates, the ShopGirls, the Freaks, and the Mole People. If meticulously curated online personas can replace private identities, what takes over when those constructs are lost?

The Disaster Tourist, by Yun Ko-eun

Welcome to the desert island of Mui, where a paid vacation to paradise is nothing short of a disaster in this “mordantly witty novel [that] reads like a highly literary, ultra-incisive thriller (Refinery29).

Jungle is a cutting-edge travel agency specializing in tourism to destinations devastated by disaster and climate change. And until she found herself at the mercy of a predatory colleague, Yona was one of their top representatives. Now on the verge of losing her job, she’s given a proposition: take a paid “vacation” to the desert island of Mui and pose as a tourist to assess the company’s least profitable holiday.

When she uncovers a plan to fabricate an extravagant catastrophe, she must choose: prioritize the callous company to whom she’s dedicated her life, or embrace a fresh start in a powerful new position? An eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility, The Disaster Tourist introduces a fresh new voice to the United States that engages with the global dialogue around climate activism, dark tourism, and the #MeToo movement.

The Last Human, by Zack Jordan

Most days, Sarya doesn’t feel like the most terrifying creature in the galaxy. Most days, she’s got other things on her mind. Like hiding her identity among the hundreds of alien species roaming the corridors of Watertower Station. Or making sure her adoptive mother doesn’t casually eviscerate one of their neighbors. Again.

And most days, she can almost accept that she’ll never know the truth—that she’ll never know why humanity was deemed too dangerous to exist. Or whether she really is—impossibly—the lone survivor of a species destroyed a millennium ago. That is, until an encounter with a bounty hunter and a miles-long kinetic projectile leaves her life and her perspective shattered.

Thrown into the universe at the helm of a stolen ship—with the dubious assistance of a rebellious spacesuit, an android death enthusiast on his sixtieth lifetime, and a ball of fluff with an IQ in the thousands—Sarya begins to uncover an impossible truth. What if humanity’s death and her own existence are simply two moves in a demented cosmic game, one played out by vast alien intellects? Stranger still, what if these mad gods are offering Sarya a seat at their table—and a second chance for humanity?

What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City, by Mona Hanna-Attisha 

Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water—and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk. And at the center of the story is Dr. Mona herself—an immigrant, doctor, scientist, and mother whose family’s activist roots inspired her pursuit of justice.

What the Eyes Don’t See is a riveting account of a shameful disaster that became a tale of hope, the story of a city on the ropes that came together to fight for justice, self-determination, and the right to build a better world for their—and all of our—children.

Illuminae (The Illuminae Files), by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

This morning, Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the hardest thing she’d have to do. This afternoon, her planet was invaded.

The year is 2575, and two rival megacorporations are at war over a planet that’s little more than a speck at the edge of the universe. Now with enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra—who are barely even talking to each other—are forced to evacuate with a hostile warship in hot pursuit.

But their problems are just getting started. A plague has broken out and is mutating with terrifying results; the fleet’s AI may actually be their enemy; and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a web of data to find the truth, it’s clear the only person who can help her is the ex-boyfriend she swore she’d never speak to again.

Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, maps, files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more—Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

Join us next Thursday with another topic or genre and many more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries!  

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!