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Isaac’s Storm |
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 Isaac’s Storm byErik Larson Random House Canada (Vintage Books) 323 pages, 2000 ISBN 0375708278 Reviewed by our UK Editor Rachel A. Hyde Galveston could have been one of the most important cities in Texas and appeared to those who saw it for the first time like a fairy city, all new buildings and seeming to rise out of the sea. Then on 8 September 1900, the sea claimed it. This is the story of what happened and of the resident meteorologist Isaac Cline who failed to read the signs that the hurricane was coming. Isaac’s Storm is a work of non-fiction that can be read like a novel, and a thrilling one at that. The chapters build up to the devastating climax of a storm that killed over 8000 people and destroyed an entire city, describing how people thought it was fun at first and children were playing in the water as it swirled through the streets that were set too close to the sea and its flat strand. Interlaced through it all is the life of Cline, the surreal history of meteorology and how America was poised on the edge of the old and the new as the century turned - all told in a way that Charles Fort or Ray Bradbury would envy. Cline looks back to a time when he arrived in Texas to find that Abilene had grown up overnight and wasn’t even on the maps yet. When he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1882, President James Garfield had been shot only a year before and his killer hanged the previous week. Weather predicting was looked upon with distrust and a certain amount of fear, almost like a type of magic when the Weather Bureau was first started and Cline worked hard to make his office respectable. Then came the day when he lost everything, like so many other people, and he became the inhabitant of a city where no family escaped bereavement. Isaac’s Storm is a powerful book that stays in the mind long after it has been read. It is a look at man’s arrogance and vanity, and at the belief that nature can be controlled. If you think predicting the weather is a boring topic, read this book and see it in a different light forever. |
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