"'I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.' Yeonmi Park was not dreaming of freedom when she escaped from North Korea. She didn't even know what it meant to be free. All she knew was that she was running for her life, that if she and her family stayed behind they would die--from starvation, or disease, or even execution. This book is the story of Park's struggle to survive in the darkest,...

Discusses the circumstances surrounding fifty disasters, from the Campanian Ignimbrite super-eruption in 37,000 BC to the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. The natural world is a dangerous place. Civilization has rearranged nature for human convenience, and it works-- most of the time. Eaton shows how disasters-- natural and man-made, from antiquity to the present-- have affected civilization ... and how we can learn from them.