This book explores the human contribution to the reliability and resilience of complex, well-defended systems. Usually the human is considered a hazard - a system component whose unsafe acts are implicated in the majority of catastrophic breakdowns. However there is another perspective that has been relatively little studied in its own right - the human as hero, whose adaptations and compensations bring troubled systems back from the brink of disaster time and again. What, if anything, did...

Major accidents are rare events due to the many barriers, safeguards and defences developed by modern technologies. But they continue to happen with saddening regularity and their human and financial consequences are all too often unacceptably catastrophic. One of the greatest challenges we face is to develop more effective ways of both understanding and limiting their occurrence. This lucid book presents a set of common principles to further our knowledge of the causes of major accidents ...

Human Error, published in 1991, is a major theoretical integration of several previously isolated literatures. Particularly important is the identification of cognitive processes common to a wide variety of error types. Technology has now reached a point where improved safety can only be achieved on the basis of a better understanding of human error mechanisms. In its treatment of major accidents, the book spans the disciplinary gulf between psychological theory and those concerned with ma...

In this fourth book of Reasoner's ten-book Civil War series, as Cory Brannon has a chance to assist the South with supplies brought in by blockade-runners and discovers his sweetheart Lucille Farrell, a sense of obligation and duty stirs in the hotheaded Titus back home in Virginia, and the Confederate cause claims another Brannon son, this one a gifted rifleman.In early 1863, a fitful calm pervades the Virginia front until another Union commander is named. Joe Hooker leads his arm...

Hired to find out who's been threatening a Texas state senator's granddaughter, the two triplet sleuths Callista and Joseph Kingfisher find themselves in more trouble than they bargained for as Callie goes undercover at a therapeutic riding center and becomes involved in a dangerous conspiracy with roots on the other side of the world.Between international criminals who want them dead, an enigmatic former Special Forces operator who can't be trusted, federal agents who would like t...

Following the defeat of Confederate forces at Chattanooga, the battered Rebel army, including a bitter Cory Brannon, retreats slowly toward Atlanta. A large Union army led by General William Sherman is marching to the coastal city of Savannah, laying waste to the territory through which it passes. Behind enemy lines on the Brannon family farm, Henry has been removed as sheriff, and to everyone’s surprise, Cordelia is courted by a Union officer, a Yankee she finds herself unable to hate. As...

This succinct but absorbing book covers the main way stations on James Reason’s 40-year journey in pursuit of the nature and varieties of human error. In it he presents an engrossing and very personal perspective, offering the reader exceptional insights, wisdom and wit as only James Reason can. The journey begins with a bizarre absent-minded action slip committed by Professor Reason in the early 1970s - putting cat food into the teapot - and continues up to the present day, conveying his ...

Shiloh is the second book in a ten-book series spanning the Civil War and describing its effects on one Southern family.As the Civil War sweeps across the country, it finds the most wayfaring member of the Brannon family of Culpeper County, Virginia, working as a wharf rat at a port on the Mississippi River. Cory Brannon, caught up in a bar fight he tried to avoid, is rescued by Captain Zeke Farrell, who offers him a job as part of his crew on the riverboat Missouri Ze...

Although Stonewall Jackson was dead, Confederate moral was never higher. The victory at Chancellorsville had come against overwhelming odds, and the Union army was in retreat. In less than a year, the Federals had been pushed back from the outskirts of Richmond and, now, virtually out of Virginia.Will and Mac, the two eldest Brannon sons, are in the ranks of the Stonewall Brigade and Jeb Stuart's cavalry. A short bivouac allows them to visit the family farm, but almost as soon as W...

The exciting conclusion to Reasoner's Civil War Battle SeriesWith the conclusion of the ten-volume saga, the multiple strands of the story are woven toward their resolution. Members of the Brannon family are involved in battles spread across the country. In the Shenandoah Valley, Mac and Titus fight alongside Fitzhugh Lee. Nathan Hatcher wears the Union blue in the Dakota Territory, while in the Deep South, Cory fights against William T. Sherman and Henry rides with Nathan Bedford ...

The last half of 1863 has taken a toll on the Brannon family, but winter has finally forced the armies to suspend campaigning. The lull in the fighting allows Mac to take leave from Jeb Stuart's cavalry, and Will comeshome from a Richmond hospital to convalesce.What little calm Christmas brings, however, is shattered with the sudden appearance—as if from the grave—of Titus, the son believed to have been lost to the war more than a year earlier. Though his return is joyous news, Tit...

In early 1862, the Civil War comes within view of the Brannon family farm in Culpeper County, Virginia. The din of drilling soldiers sweeps over the quiet county seat, and another Brannon son, Mac, answers the call to arms.The long-anticipated spring offensive pitches the Union and Confederate armies against each other on the Virginia Peninsula, and it appears that Richmond and the fledgling Confederacy are doomed. As the Southerners fall back before the slowly advancing Northern a...