Disasters: Natural and Man-Made Catastrophes Through the Centuries by Brenda Z. Guiberson.

This a book full of stories. Stories of people fighting against the odds to survive - and all these stories are true. Some of the disasters that people face in this book are disease, fire, flood, shipwreck, earthquake and hurricanes. How do people survive? Find out from this book - which uses people's own words to describe what happened and how they got through it. As well as using people's words from the time, there's also photographs and drawings bringing these disasters right into your hands.

Disasters examines how people have contributed to making natural disasters much worse. For example, in the 19th Century, Chicago was made out of wood. The buildings were wood, the bridges linking the sections of the city were wood, even the sidewalks were wood. And pockets of air were trapped under the sidewalks and buildings. It was a huge fire waiting for the right circumstances and the drought of 1871 gave those circumstances.

Each of these chapters is an easy to read 20 pages, with plenty of pictures, and you can dip in and read them in any order - it's a bit like a magazine. So if you like your reading to be real stories with some grim, and occasionally repulsive, details - then Disasters could be for you!