On the night of January 31, 1953, a mountain of water, literally piled up out of the sea by a freak winter hurricane, swept down on the Netherlands, demolishing the dikes protecing the country and wiping a quarter of its landmass from the map. It was the worst natural disaster to strike the Netherlands in three hundred years. The author interweaves the stories of two sister, deftly alternating between the cataclysm and the long years of its grief-strewn...

In the span of five violent hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed major Gulf Coast cities and flattened 150 miles of coastline. But it was only the first stage of a shocking triple tragedy. On the heels of one of the three strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States came the storm-surge flooding, which submerged a half-million homes-followed by the human tragedy of government mismanagement, which proved as cruel...

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina's monstrous winds and surging water overwhelmed the protective levees around low-lying New Orleans, Louisiana. Eighty percent of the city flooded, in some places under twenty feet of water. Property damages across the Gulf Coast topped $100 billion. One thousand eight hundred and thirty-three people lost their lives. The tale of this historic storm and the drowning of an American city is one of selflessness, heroism,...