Humanity's ability to imagine, invent and devise is matched only by its penchant for complacency, greed, folly and hubris.

A Century of Man-Made Disasters by Nigel Blundell provides a quick but thorough look at 15 instances in the 20th century when tragedy struck because someone was careless or because someone simply believed that some device or procedure was invulnerable. Of course, that kind of thinking leads to a comeuppance all too often ... and sometimes at a terrible price.

There is probably no greater example than the ocean liner Titanic, which of course was touted as unsinkable and, therefore, sank on her first voyage. The Hindenburg, too, is a well-known example of a final chapter no one expected; the zeppelin was the pride of the Nazis and was expected to complete another flawless trans-Atlantic crossing.

In each brief chapter, Blundell provides interesting details about the tragedy, explaining what happened and what harm befell the victims. In some cases, people brought about their own end -- such as Lord Thomson of Cardington, who not only died in the wreck of the prototype British airship R101 in 1930, but who took dozens of people with him in the blazing inferno when it came down on a French hillside. In other, more tragic instances, innocent bystanders paid the price, such as the 116 schoolchildren and 28 others who died in an avalanche of slurry above a Welsh coal-mining town in 1966.

Also included are a five-train collision in 1915 and a train entirely overcome by gases when it stopped in a tunnel in 1944; the deaths of three American astronauts when fire consumed the Apollo 1 capsule during a training exercise in 1967 and of three Soviet cosmonauts on their return from Salyut 1, the world's first permanent space station, just four years later; carnage caused by riots and fires at football (soccer) stadiums in the 1970s and '80s; the poisonous chemical cloud that enveloped a small Italian hamlet in 1976; a collision of two jumbo jets in 1977; the Challenger explosion in January 1986 and the Chernobyl accident four months later; and the wrecks of a ferry crossing the English Channel in 1987, the Exxon Valdez which dumped more than 10 million gallons of crude oil off the Alaskan coastline in 1989, and the ferry MS Estonia which killed 852 passengers and crew in 1994.

Each chapter is accompanied by several photographs that bring home the events Blundell describes, showing the devastation left behind or the people who died. His text is brief, to the point and very disturbing as he makes plain how each disaster could have been prevented or avoided.

It's a good read. It's also a collection of important lessons shining a bright light on mistakes that cost many people their lives.