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The Untold History of America's First Tornado Chasers
Pantheon Books
March 2013
On Sale: March 5, 2013
266 pages
ISBN: 0307378527
EAN: 9780307378521
Kindle: B00985E19Y
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
With 16 pages of black-and-white
illustrations
From the acclaimed author of
Wicked River comes Storm Kings, a riveting
tale of supercell tornadoes and the quirky, pioneering,
weather-obsessed scientists whose discoveries created the
science of modern meteorology.
While tornadoes
have occasionally been spotted elsewhere, only the central
plains of North America have the perfect conditions for
their creation. For the early settlers the sight of a funnel
cloud was an unearthly event. They called it the “Storm
King,” and their descriptions bordered on the supernatural:
it glowed green or red, it whistled or moaned or sang. In
Storm Kings, Lee Sandlin explores America’s
fascination with and unique relationship to tornadoes. From
Ben Franklin’s early experiments to the “great storm war” of
the nineteenth century to heartland life in the early
twentieth century, Sandlin re-creates with vivid
descriptions some of the most devastating storms in
America’s history, including the Tri-state Tornado of 1925
and the Peshtigo “fire tornado,” whose deadly path of
destruction was left encased in glass.
Drawing
on memoirs, letters, eyewitness testimonies, and archives,
Sandlin brings to life the forgotten characters and
scientists who changed a nation—including James Espy,
America’s first meteorologist, and Colonel John Park Finley,
who helped place a network of weather “spotters” across the
country. Along the way, Sandlin details the little-known but
fascinating history of the National Weather Service, paints
a vivid picture of the early Midwest, and shows how
successive generations came to understand, and finally
coexist with, the spiraling menace that could erase lives
and whole towns in an instant.
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