From my earliest childhood, I have been fascinated by reports of people in horrific situations large and small. In fifth grade, when everyone else was writing about Lewis and Clark, I did a report on the Donner Party expedition. When I visited my Evanston relatives, I insisted on being taken to see historic Chicago Fire sites. I knew every knowable detail of the night the Titanic sank long before Leonardo Di Caprio was born. Why? Perhaps my rather unpleasant childhood compelled me to crave descriptions of scenarios that made my own life seem comparatively safe and organized. (My favorite moments in the relatively sunny Little House books were the near-starvation in The Long Winter and the near-death in the “Fever and Ague” episode.) Bring on the cannibalism, the destruction, the nightmare scenarios! At least it didn’t happen to me! Whistling in the dark. 

Sometimes the possibilities felt personal. I knew, for example, that my paternal grandmother had worked on the ninth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory until only months before the tragic fire. And I knew, too, that my Jewish blood would have made me eligible for Hitler’s death camps had I been born in another time and place. Or perhaps these were the ordinary morbid interests of a child with access to all sorts of troubling yet exciting books, combined with the fascination with situation that marks the nascent novelist.

• Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party Expedition by George Stewart

• Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read

• A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

• The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury

• The Circus Fire by Stewart O’Nan

• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

• American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago by Ross Miller