How to Survive History: How to Outrun a Tyrannosaurus, Escape Pompeii, Get Off the Titanic, and Survive the Rest of History’s Deadliest Catastrophes

Cassidy follows up Who Ate the First Oyster? with an insightful and entertaining look at 15 of the most catastrophic events in world history. From the struggle between predator and prey in the age of dinosaurs to the 1925 tristate tornado, which “cut a mile-wide gash through southern Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, and killed at least 695 people,” Cassidy provides detailed accounts of the events leading up to each catastrophe and sound advice on how best they could have survived them. Conscripted laborers who built the Great Pyramid of Giza suffered from extreme arthritis and died at an average age of 35, Cassidy reveals, but those who sought a doctor’s care for anything but “traumatic bone injuries” often regretted it: treatments included “broths of dead flies and cooked mice.” Sheltering in place during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was a bad idea (better to have fled north on the road to Naples), but members of the Donner Party who stuck to their cabins and “did nothing at all” improved their odds of survival by lowering their metabolism (overcoming the “social taboo” of cannibalism also helped). A crisp blend of humor, history, and science, this is a crowd pleaser. (June)