For most of the twentieth century, a single block in Hong Kong held as many as fifty thousand people, more than three hundred towers grown together into one dark hive, and almost no government at all. This is the strange, human story of Kowloon Walled City: how a forgotten fort became the densest place on Earth, and why it had to be torn down.
At six years old, polio left Paul Alexander paralysed and sealed inside a steel cylinder that breathed for him. He stayed there for more than seventy years — and in that time earned a law degree, argued cases in court, and wrote a book, one letter at a time, with a stick in his mouth.
On a cold December morning in 1917, a burning munitions ship drew crowds to their windows. Then the north end of Halifax simply ceased to exist — nearly 2,000 dead in the largest man-made explosion the world had yet known.
In the autumn of 1984, hundreds of people in a small Oregon town fell violently ill and no one knew why. The truth, when it came, was stranger than any of them imagined: the first large-scale bioterror attack on American soil, carried out to win a local election.
It killed more people than the Titanic and the Lusitania combined, and you have probably never heard its name. The story of the MV Dona Paz is the deadliest peacetime disaster in maritime history, and a portrait of everything that can go wrong at once.
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.
