In thousands of shoe stores, children once leaned over a wooden cabinet and watched the bones of their own feet wiggle in an eerie green glow. It was a marvel, a sales gimmick, and a slow-dripping dose of radiation all at once. This is the story of the decades it took the world to learn that its favorite miracle could hurt.
Just after two in the morning, New York Harbor turned to daylight. A munitions depot the size of a small town had detonated, hurling shrapnel into the Statue of Liberty and shattering windows across two cities. It was no accident. It was an act of war, carried out on American soil while the nation still believed itself safely neutral. This is the story of the Black Tom explosion.
On August 6, 1945, a young engineer stood three kilometres from the centre of Hiroshima when the sky turned to fire. Burned and half-blind, he made his way home to recover — to a city called Nagasaki. Three days later, standing in his office describing the horror he had just escaped, he watched the same blinding light fill the window a second time. This is the almost unbelievable true story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi.
On the night of October 8, 1871, the sky over a small Wisconsin lumber town turned to fire. In little more than an hour, a firestorm hot enough to boil a river dry killed more people than any wildfire in American history. And almost no one remembers it, because 250 miles south, Chicago was burning too.
