Isaac's Storm
A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
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Narrated by:
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Richard Davidson
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By:
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Erik Larson
About this listen
At the dawn of the 20th 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." It was 1900, a year when America felt bigger and stronger than ever before. Nothing in nature could hobble the gleaming city of Galveston, then a magical place that seemed destined to become the New York of the Gulf.
That August, a strange, prolonged heat wave gripped the nation and killed scores of people in New York and Chicago. Odd things seemed to happen everywhere: A plague of crickets engulfed Waco. The Bering Glacier began to shrink. Rain fell on Galveston with greater intensity than anyone could remember. Far away, in Africa, immense thunderstorms blossomed over the city of Dakar, and great currents of wind converged. A wave of atmospheric turbulence slipped from the coast of western Africa. Most such waves faded quickly. This one did not.
In Cuba, America's overconfidence was made all too obvious by the Weather Bureau's obsession with controlling hurricane forecasts, even though Cuba's indigenous weathermen had pioneered hurricane science. As the bureau's forecasters assured the nation that all was calm in the Caribbean, Cuba's own weathermen fretted about ominous signs in the sky. A curious stillness gripped Antigua. Only a few unlucky sea captains discovered that the storm had achieved an intensity no man alive had ever experienced.
In Galveston, reassured by Cline's belief that no hurricane could seriously damage the city, there was celebration. Children played in the rising water. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky, until the surf began ripping the city's beloved beachfront apart. Within the next few hours 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 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
And Isaac Cline would experience his own unbearable loss.
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. Ultimately, however, it is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets nature's last great uncontrollable force. As such, Isaac's Storm carries a warning for our time.
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- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The paths of the great American robber barons were paved with riches, and though ordinary citizens paid for them, they also profited. Les Standiford, author of the John Deal thrillers, tells how the man who turned Florida's swamps into the playgrounds of the rich performed the almost superhuman feat of building a railroad from the mainland to Key West at the turn of the century.
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A Pleasant Surprise
- By Roy on 04-05-09
By: Les Standiford
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The Johnstown Flood
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon.
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A page-turner! HIstory that reads like a novel
- By Susan K Donley on 06-17-05
By: David McCullough
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Brilliant Beacons
- A History of the American Lighthouse
- By: Eric Jay Dolin
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Set against the backdrop of an expanding nation, Brilliant Beacons traces the evolution of America's lighthouse system, highlighting the political, military, and technological battles fought to illuminate the nation's hardscrabble coastlines.
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Great book about Lighthouses
- By Anastasia on 04-25-21
By: Eric Jay Dolin
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The Devil in the White City
- Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
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Story
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds.
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The Great Halifax Explosion
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Overall
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Performance
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From best-selling author John U. Bacon, a gripping narrative history of the largest manmade detonation prior to Hiroshima. On Monday, December 3, 1917, the French freighter SS Mont-Blanc set sail from Brooklyn carrying the largest cache of explosives ever loaded onto a ship, including 2,300 tons of picric acid, an unstable, poisonous chemical more powerful than TNT.
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Too much hostility towards Americans
- By bigdaddyKT on 12-14-19
By: John U. Bacon
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Dead Wake
- The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic.
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Naivety VS Barbarians Of War
- By Sara on 03-05-16
By: Erik Larson
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A Crack in the Edge of the World
- America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale.
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7 Hours and 45 minutes . . .
- By Tim on 12-09-05
By: Simon Winchester
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Simple Courage
- The True Story of Peril on the Sea
- By: Frank Delaney
- Narrated by: Frank Delaney
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Drawing on historical documents and contemporary accounts and on exclusive interviews with Carlsen's family, Delaney opens a window into the world of the merchant marine. With deep affection, and respect, for the weather and all that goes with it, he places us in the heart of the storm, a "biblical tempest" of unimaginable power. He illuminates the bravery and ingenuity of Carlsen and the extraordinary courage that the 37-year-old captain inspired in his stalwart crew.
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Well written and read
- By AMS on 03-03-08
By: Frank Delaney
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The Children's Blizzard
- By: David Laskin
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.
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True Account of 1888 Prairie Blizzard
- By Mary Burnight on 01-09-17
By: David Laskin
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Ship Ablaze
- The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum
- By: Edward T. O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
There were few experienced swimmers among over 1,300 Lower East Side residents who boarded the General Slocum on June 15, 1904. It shouldn't have mattered since the steamship was only chartered for a languid excursion from Manhattan to Long Island Sound. But a fire erupted minutes into the trip, forcing hundreds of terrified passengers into the water. By the time the captain found a safe shore for landing, 1,021 had perished. It was New York's deadliest tragedy prior to September 11, 2001.
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I love learning the “rest of the story”
- By Mark Mears on 07-17-18
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Storm Kings
- The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers
- By: Lee Sandlin
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Isaac's Storm meets The Age of Wonder in Lee Sandlin's Storm Kings, a riveting tale of the weather's most vicious monster - the super cell tornado - that recreates the origins of meteorology, and the quirky, pioneering, weather-obsessed scientists who helped change America.
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American Meteorological History at its best
- By Leslye Sinn on 10-23-16
By: Lee Sandlin
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Ruthless Tide
- The Heroes and Villains of the Johnstown Flood, America’s Astonishing Gilded Age Disaster
- By: Al Roker
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A gripping narrative history of the 1889 Johnstown Flood - the deadliest flood in US history - from New York Times best-selling author, NBC host, and legendary weather authority Al Roker. May 1889: After a deluge of rainfall swelled the Little Conemaugh River, panicked engineers watched helplessly as swiftly rising waters threatened to breach the South Fork Dam in central Pennsylvania. Though they telegraphed neighboring towns, warning of the impending danger, residents, used to false alarms, remained in their homes. At 3:10 p.m., the dam gave way....
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Mispronunciation bothers me
- By Tracy on 09-08-18
By: Al Roker
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Eighty Days
- Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World
- By: Matthew Goodman
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 18 hrs and 57 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly, the crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world. Also departing from New York that day—and heading in the opposite direction by train—was a young journalist from The Cosmopolitan magazine, Elizabeth Bisland.
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Who knew?
- By Susan Gardner Bowers on 03-18-13
By: Matthew Goodman
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The Great Quake
- How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
- By: Henry Fountain
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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A riveting narrative about the biggest earthquake in North American recorded history - the 1964 Alaska earthquake that demolished the city of Valdez and swept away the island village of Chenega - and the geologist who hunted for clues to explain how and why it took place.
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Fascinating to hear the full story
- By Debby A Davis on 08-18-17
By: Henry Fountain
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Review of "The Storm of the Century "
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In 1934, hundreds of jobless World War I veterans were sent to the remote Florida Keys to build a highway from Miami to Key West. The Roosevelt Administration was making a genuine effort to help these down-and-out vets. But the attempt to help them turned into a tragedy. The supervisors in charge of the veterans misunderstood the danger posed by hurricanes in the low-lying Florida Keys. The hurricane that struck the Upper Florida Keys on the evening of September 2, 1935, is still the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the US.
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Mary Churchill’s War
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Love Mary Soames
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In late September 2015, Hurricane Joaquin swept past the Bahamas and swallowed a pair of cargo vessels in its destructive path: El Faro, a 790-foot American behemoth with a crew of 33, and the Minouche, a 230-foot freighter with a dozen sailors aboard. From the parallel stories of these ships and their final journeys, Tristram Korten weaves a remarkable tale of two veteran sea captains from very different worlds, the harrowing ordeals of their desperate crews, and the Coast Guard’s extraordinary battle against a storm that defied prediction.
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A Furious Sky
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With A Furious Sky, Eric Jay Dolin has created a vivid, sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus's New World voyages to the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes and puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history.
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Good start but went political at the end.
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The Great Hurricane
- 1938
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On the night of September 20, 1938, the news on the radio was full of Hitler's pending invasion of Czechoslovakia. Severe weather wasn't mentioned; only light rain was forecast for the following day. In a matter of hours, however, a hurricane of unprecedented force would tear through one of the wealthiest and most populated stretches of coastline in America, obliterating communities from Long Island to Providence, destroying entire fishing fleets from Montauk to Narragansett Bay.
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Mesmerizing book!
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The Johnstown Flood
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At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon.
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A page-turner! HIstory that reads like a novel
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Simple Courage
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What listeners say about Isaac's Storm
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Dianna Myers
- 05-14-23
Isaacs Storm
Very good. Informative and eye opening
I enjoyed this book as much as I have others by this author
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- fernando bononcini
- 05-22-24
The details of the story
I liked the intensity and suspense that me coming back to listen to the book
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- Leslie
- 04-10-21
Too boring
Too much information made it cumbersome and at times boring. Usually love Erik Larson books but not this one!
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- Seabreazer
- 06-08-20
A devastating storm and its aftermath
This was an interesting thesis on the men that studied and attempted to predict hurricanes in the early 20th Century. The approach of a storm in the Gulf of Mexico approaching Galveston, TX was tragically mis- forecast causing devastating loss of life and property. With today's modern forecasting tech, including weather satellites the tracts of storms can be more accurately predicted the numbers of those killed has been reduced, but not eliminated.
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- Ray Cassidy
- 05-30-23
A Harrowing Tale
Larson’s ability to take you through the emotions and terrors experienced by his real-life characters is masterful. This book is an artful, moving work of non-fiction writing that is a must read.
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- Ro
- 10-05-21
Great book!
My Gr. Gr. Grandmother Mary Edmonds , who ran a boarding house on 18 th and K ave. died in this storm. Two of her sons tried to save her but had to let go of her body to save herself . Fortunately, there was a small notice written in a paper that described what happened that night with my GG grandmother and the other occupants of her house. Her body was found on Sept 13th on 20 th and O 1/2 street and a neighbor said they buried her in a crossing there and would keep anyone from disturbing her body. It took nearly 20 years for me to piece together what happened to her. I’m very interested in all the books that are written about the the great Galveston storm
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- LB Stewart
- 01-13-24
Isaac’s Hubris Defended
Great backstory but, sheesh, Isaac’s arrogant lack of wherewithal in the face of mounting evidence and then disrespect to his brother’s efforts during the crisis made the narrative feel like it was an excuse or coverup for one man’s catastrophic hubris.I lost respect for the man in power at the time of the catastrophe despite the kid glove handling of the”protagonist”, but I gained respect and understanding for the power of nature and the importance of this historical event.
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- A. K. C.
- 02-27-24
Well read and well written account.
The author makes it easy to follow history and important events in US tragedy. The narrator is easy to listen to.
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- Customer 99999
- 05-29-24
Heartbreaking and cautionary
A study in the lethal confluence of hubris and willful ignorance. Six thousand people died, and survivors were changed forever. Compelling. scientific, and personal.
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- Chris Buse
- 05-18-24
this book really shouldn't be
I've never read an Erik Larson book I didn't like. I still haven't but this one was far and away the thinest on story, uninteresting, and so on. It mightve been a great tragedy but there aren't enough first person accounts from the event to flesh out a real "book." Sadly to me the most interesting part was watching a few firsts in meteorology occur and watching some early weathermen eat crow pie. in terms of a quality story and especially compared to its peers, this book is a "hard pass."
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