It's easy to feel trapped by circumstance. Something goes wrong in your personal life, and suddenly you have nowhere to go and there's nothing you can do about it. But books about people who were actually trapped can teach you how lucky you are.
In 2010, reporters all over the world were enraptured by the story of 33 Chilean miners stuck a half-mile underground for more than two weeks, but only journalist Hector Tobar could successfully capture what the miners went through in Deep Down Dark.
Even without being buried alive, there are plenty of ways to be trapped. While finishing construction work in a large sewage pipe deep under Boston Harbor, five people hired to complete the job discovered they were running out of oxygen and needed to slowly drive nine miles out of the pipe to safety. Only three survived. Trapped Under the Sea retells not only the disaster itself, but also the decisions that led to it and the consequences for many of the people involved.
And once you're out in the clear blue sky, with nothing in your way, governments and the people who work for them still know how to hem you in. Shin Dong-hyuk was born and raised in a North Korean prison camp, trapped for the first two decades of his life with no hope of escape. Until, that is, he escaped. Escape From Camp 14 is a remarkable story of the horrors people inflict on each other and also the ways to escape them.
Notice, in each of these books, despite the odds, somebody always escapes. Remember that the next time you're stuck in traffic.
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