Books like Lost in Shangri-la by Mitchell Zuckoff

After graduating college, journalist Jon Krakauer traces the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young adventurer who abandoned possessions, took the name Alexander Supertramp, and ventured into Alaska’s wilderness, where he met his untimely death.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

Louis Zamperini’s extraordinary journey from Olympic gold‑medalist to a World War II bombardier, through a Pacific plane crash, 47 days adrift, and harrowing imprisonment by the Japanese, is a gripping tale of survival and resilience.

In 1942, two U.S. aircraft crashed on the Greenland ice cap during World War II rescue missions, leading to harrowing survival stories and a desperate quest for the missing crew.

David McCullough chronicles the daring brothers who, in 1903, achieved the first human‑powered flight on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, revealing their ingenuity, determination, and the family support that drove their success.

An inspiring true story of a WWII pilot’s survival, resilience, and redemption, examined through detailed battlefield context and human courage.

From the Introduction... Rickenbacker lived at a time when the latest machines of the industrial revolutions were ripping apart the ages-old rhythms of plow and steam. When he was seven, the first car race reported average times of a little over 7 miles an hour; by his teenaged years, he would routinely clock speeds of 100 mph in competitions. When he was twelve, no one had flown in a heavier-than-air, powered machine or was expected to anytime soon; by his twenties, he was dogfighting at Mount Olympus heights. The motorcar and airplane each enabled its operator to experience dimensions of speed and time that no human being had ever encountered before. Again and again, Americans would watch as Eddie Rickenbacker climbed into these machines and pushed them faster and harder, escaping death by a heartbeat, only to flash a broad aw-shucks grin and go out and do it again. Rickenbacker and the handful of fellow pioneers who straddled the early automotive and aviation worlds, often tempering the ingenious machines of Ford and Wright with their blood, exhibited the first truly modern “right stuff,” working without manuals or more than rudimentary instruction and pushing themselves and their machines to places where they didn’t know what would happen next. The pure creativity and imagination deployed by these young men who flew by the seat of their pants, innovated on the fly, and cheated death at technology’s outer edges were breathtaking.

As the country's first African American military pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen fought in World War II on two fronts: against the Axis powers in the skies over Europe and against Jim Crow racism and segregation at home. Although the pilots flew more than 15,000 sorties and destroyed more than 200 German aircraft, their most far-reaching achievement defies quantification: delivering a powerful blow to racial inequality and discrimination in American life. In this inspiring account of the Tuskegee Airmen, historian J. Todd Moye captures the challenges and triumphs of these brave pilots in their own words, drawing on more than 800 interviews recorded for the National Park Service's Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. Denied the right to fully participate in the U.S. war effort alongside whites at the beginning of World War II, African Americans--spurred on by black newspapers and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP--compelled the prestigious Army Air Corps to open its training programs to black pilots, despite the objections of its top generals. Thousands of young men came from every part of the country to Tuskegee, Alabama, in the heart of the segregated South, to enter the program, which expanded in 1943 to train multi-engine bomber pilots in addition to fighter pilots. By the end of the war, Tuskegee Airfield had become a small city populated by black mechanics, parachute packers, doctors, and nurses. Together, they helped prove that racial segregation of the fighting forces was so inefficient as to be counterproductive to the nation's defense. Freedom Flyers brings to life the legacy of a determined, visionary cadre of African American airmen who proved their capabilities and patriotism beyond question, transformed the armed forces--formerly the nation's most racially polarized institution--and jump-started the modern struggle for racial equality. - Publisher.

After a plane crash, a group of strangers finds themselves in the mysterious, untouched Shangri-La mountains in Tibet.

The story of the United States Army Air Forces and the brave pilots who flew B-24 bombers during World War II.