You can't escape the weather! (In my head that came out ominously, so - imagine that.) Weather is everywhere all the time. It can be calm and perfect, or an absolute torrent of awfulness - much like the predication for what is to hit DC soon. Dun dun DUN!
Weather is a dramatic force in our world and, thus, is an awesome subject for all kinds of books. Here are just a few titles to keep you entertained on a rainy, snowy, or sunny day.
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea
Sebastian Junger
On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved
through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and
Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest
floor into a roaring inferno. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten
thousand men—college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps—to
fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those
flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the
implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the
larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his
chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation,
Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public
land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen.
The Last Run: A True Story of Rescue and Redemption on the Alaska Seas
Todd Lewan
Tornado Alley: Monster Storms of the Great Plains - Howard M. Bluestein
Tornado Hunter: Getting Inside the Most Violent Storm on Earth - Stefan Bechtel and Tim Samaras
The Children's Blizzard - David Laskin
The Johnstown Flood - David McCullough
The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal - John N. Maclean
1 Dead in the Attic: After Katrina - Chris Rose
Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers - Lee Sandlin
Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938 - R.A. Scotti
The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina - Ivor Van Heerden and Mike Bryan
Weather is a dramatic force in our world and, thus, is an awesome subject for all kinds of books. Here are just a few titles to keep you entertained on a rainy, snowy, or sunny day.
Sebastian Junger
It was the storm of the century—a tempest created by so rare a
combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect
storm."When it struck in October, 1991,
there was virtually no warning. "She's comin' on, boys, and she's comin'
on strong," radioed Captain Billy Tyne of the Andrea Gail from off the
coast of Nova Scotia. Soon afterward, the boat and its crew of six
disappeared without a trace. The Perfect Storm
is a real-life thriller, a stark and compelling journey into the dark
heart of nature that leaves listeners with a breathless sense of what it
feels like to be caught, helpless, in the grip of a force beyond
understanding or control.
Erik Larson
At the dawn of the twentieth century, a great
confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a
scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion
of clouds and the behavior of storms. The idea that a hurricane could
damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based, was to him
preposterous, "an absurd delusion." Galveston would endure a hurricane
that to this day remains the nation's deadliest natural disaster. In
Galveston alone at least 6,000 people - possibly as many as 10,000 -
would lose their lives, a number far greater than the combined death
toll of the Johnstown Flood and the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
Meticulously researched and vividly written, ISAAC'S STORM is based on
Cline's own letters, telegrams, and reports, the testimony of scores of
survivors, and our latest understanding of the hows and whys of great
storms. It is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets
nature's last uncontrollable force. As such, ISAAC'S STORM carries a
warning for our time.
Gary Krist
In February 1910, a monstrous, record-breaking blizzard hit the
Northwest. Nowhere was the danger more terrifying than near a tiny town
called Wellington, perched high in the Cascade Mountains, where a
desperate situation evolved: two trainloads of cold, hungry passengers
and their crews found themselves marooned. For days, an army of the
Great Northern Railroad's most dedicated men worked to rescue the
trains, but just when escape seemed possible, the unthinkable occurred—a
colossal avalanche tumbled down, sweeping the trains over the steep
slope and down the mountainside. Centered on the astonishing spectacle
of our nation's deadliest avalanche, The White Cascade is the masterfully told story of a never-before-documented tragedy.
Timothy Egan
The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest
years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and
the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told.
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan
follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise
and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to
huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile
effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to
carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the death
of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and
survived-those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry
their memories to the grave-Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism
against the backdrop of the Great Depression.Egan captures the very
voice of the time-its grit, pathos, and abiding heroism-as only great
history can. Combining the human drama of Isaac's Storm with the sweep
of The American People in the Great Depression, The Worst Hard Time is a
lasting and important work of American history.
Timothy Egan
The Last Run: A True Story of Rescue and Redemption on the Alaska SeasTodd Lewan
It was a
desperate mission that made front-page headlines and captured the
attention of millions of readers around the world. In January 1998, in
the dead of an Alaskan winter, a cataclysmic Arctic storm with
hurricane-force winds and towering seas forced five fishermen to abandon
their vessel in the Gulf of Alaska and left them adrift in
thirty-eight-degree water with no lifeboat. Their would-be rescuers were
150 miles away at the Coast Guard station, with the nearby airport shut
down by an avalanche. The Last Run is the epic
tale of the wreck of the oldest registered fishing schooner in Alaska, a
hellish Arctic tempest, and the three teams of aviators in helicopters
who withstood 140-mph gusts and hovered alongside waves that were ten
stories high. But what makes this more than a true-life page-turner is
its portrait of untamed Alaska and the unflappable spirit of people who
forge a different kind of life on America's last frontier, the "end of
the roaders" who are drawn to, or flee to, Alaska to seek a final
destiny.
Other Weather Titles
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America - John M. BarryTornado Alley: Monster Storms of the Great Plains - Howard M. Bluestein
Tornado Hunter: Getting Inside the Most Violent Storm on Earth - Stefan Bechtel and Tim Samaras
The Children's Blizzard - David Laskin
The Johnstown Flood - David McCullough
The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal - John N. Maclean
1 Dead in the Attic: After Katrina - Chris Rose
Storm Kings: The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers - Lee Sandlin
Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938 - R.A. Scotti
The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina - Ivor Van Heerden and Mike Bryan
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