REAL
LIFE DISASTERS & DEADLY DISEASES
What
would you do if you were trapped on a mountain in a snowstorm?
How
would you react in the most extreme of conditions? Would
fear
paralyze you? Find out how the fictitious and real people in the
following books dealt with fear in their most extreme
situations:
Medusa’s Child –
John
J. Nance
Doubleday, 1997.
To earn a bit of extra money, pilot Scott McKay takes on a transport run from Miami to Denver. A mysterious crate is discovered on the plane, and McKay is ordered to change his flight plan and fly to Washington D.C. He does so, but soon hears a strange noise coming from the crate. It is a human voice warning that what the plane is carrying is a Medusa device, a fully armed thermonuclear bomb that will not only kill millions of people, but will destroy every computer chip on the continent. It is set to go off in hours.
Into Thin Air:
A
Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster – Jon Krakauer
Villard, 1997.
By May 10, 1996, climbing the 29,000 foot Mr. Everest had become almost routine. There were commercial expeditions that often took groups of people up the mountain, and on this climb, Krakauer joined just such an expedition. However, it was not a routine climb – a blinding snowstorm caught four groups of climbers on the mountain’s peaks. While Krakauer survived to write this book, eight others died, two of which were considered amongst the world’s best mountaineers. Krakauer takes readers on a journey, exploring the reasons why people take on a climb like Everest and relating the terrifying details and results of that fateful storm.
Alive on Everest
A companion site to the Public
Broadcasting System's Nova program Everest.
Cobra Event –
Richard
Preston
Random House, 1997.
The story begins one morning in New York City when a seventeen-year-old student wakes and feels vaguely ill, seemingly with a cold. Hours later, she is having violent seizures. Soon, she is dead. When other deaths similar to hers occur, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta are called in to investigate. What the CDC doctor discovers sends the country into a crisis. While a work of fiction, the details are based on the terrifying truths about biological weapons and genetic engineering. Not for the squeamish, as Preston graphically describes the details of the deadly virus.
The Centers for Disease Control
The CDC is the lead federal agency that
tracks the spread of various diseases worldwide.
Fatal Storm: the
Inside Story of the Tragic Sydney-Hobart Race – Rob Mundle
International Marine,
1999.
The Sydney-Hobart Race is an annual 630-mile sailing event. In 1998, 115 boats left Sydney Harbor expecting rough weather, but were caught completely off guard by the hurricane-strength winds they met in an unseasonable storm. Seven boats were abandoned at sea, five sank, 57 sailors rescued and six sailors died. Mundle, who reported the event on Australian television as it occurred, also relied on 124 interviews with survivors to relive the excitement and terror of the storm.
Pandora’s Clock – John
J. Nance
Doubleday, 1995.
Captain James Holland is the pilot on a routine flight from Frankfurt to New York packed with people heading home for Christmas. When a passenger collapses from a supposed heart attack, Holland requests an emergency landing in London. Air traffic controllers refuse his request, telling him his passenger has a dangerous new form of influenza, and that he must return to Germany. When German and other European officials refuse the plane entry, Holland begins to suspect something more is going on. In fact, a deadly virus with a 100% fatality rate is the cause. Now, Holland must overcome his own fear and the panic on the ground to find a way and a place to land.
LIS304
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Spring 2002
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
Dana Russell