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Survival narrative meets scientific, natural, and social history in the riveting story of a volcanic disaster. For months in early 1980, scientists, journalists, and ordinary people listened anxiously to rumblings in the longquiescent volcano Mount St. Helens. Still, when a massive explosion took the top off the mountain, no one was prepared. Fifty-seven people died, including newlywed logger John Killian (for years afterward, his father searched...

On May 18, 1980, eleven-year-old Jessie Marlowe and her best friends, Eddie and Sam, are in a forest near Mount St. Helens when the months of wondering whether the volcano will erupt are finally answered--all three are badly burned, but it is up to Jessie to protect the boys as best she can and hope that somebody comes to rescue them.

A napping volcano blinked a wake in March 1980. Two months later, when that mountain roared, Jim Scymanky was logging a slope above Hoffistadt Creek. "Rocks zinged through the woods, bouncing off trees, then the tops of trees snapped off...Suddenly I could see nothing...it got hot right away, then scorching hot and impossible to breathe...I was being cremated, the pain unbearable." Mike Hubbard was further away-sixteen miles northwest, hear Green...