…[a] lively chronicle of five tempestuous centuries…Where A Furious Sky is most compelling is in its often harrowing details. It's filled with haunting personal stories.

03/09/2020

Historian Dolin (Black Flags, Blue Waters) delivers a fast-paced and informative history of American hurricanes from the 16th century through the 2017 season, when a record-setting three storms made landfall. Though Dolin’s question of “how we can learn to survive and adapt” to hurricanes in the era of climate change doesn’t receive deep analysis, the book successfully documents the impact of storms such as the 1900 Galveston Hurricane (in which an estimated 8,000–10,000 people died) and the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, which killed hundreds of WWI veterans building the Overseas Highway in the Florida Keys. Milestones in the scientific understanding of hurricanes include Father Benito Viñes’s observational studies in 19th-century Cuba and the U.S. military’s “Hurricane Hunter” flights, which began in WWII and employed new radar technology to capture real-time data from inside storms; the information was eventually used to create computer models to predict hurricane behavior. Dolin also explains hurricane naming conventions and credits Dan Rather’s 1961 Hurricane Carla broadcasts, which showed radar images of the storm, with changing how they’re reported. Packed with intriguing miscellanea, this accessible chronicle serves as a worthy introduction to the subject. Readers will be awed by the power of these storms and the wherewithal of people to recover from them. Agent: Russell Galen, The Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (June)

"The hurricane book to end all hurricane books."

"A delightful blend of science, history, and masterful storytelling. Each of Dolin’s storm stories carries its own horrifying details and historical significance. A Furious Sky puts Dolin in the lofty company of Nathaniel Philbrick and Lincoln Paine among the most important, and downright entertaining, chroniclers of American maritime history."

"You can’t really understand hurricanes without knowing their history. Eric Jay Dolin brings America’s great hurricanes alive with rich stories about the storms and the people whose lives they changed forever. Understanding our hurricane history gives hurricane science depth and meaning. This is a hurricane book for everyone."

"[A] lively chronicle of five tempestuous centuries . . . Where A Furious Sky is most compelling is in its often harrowing details. It’s filled with haunting personal stories."

"The big blows of centuries far and near have long deserved our attention and never more than today. As Eric Jay Dolin reminds us, hurricanes have been pivot points in the course of human history. Now, they are catapulting us toward our future, underscoring the compelling nature of A Furious Sky, which in rigor and scope is as formidable as the weather outside."

"A Furious Sky is an epic narrative of the most significant hurricanes that have affected the United States. It is a fascinating book that weaves together history, science, policy, political fallout, and the inevitable human drama of hurricanes. Gripping and entertaining, A Furious Sky is a worthy addition to the literature on these great storms."

"Fascinating and heart-wrenching.... Following the science, Dolin soberly concludes: 'Hurricanes of the future will most likely be worse than those of the past."

"[A Furious Sky] is a wonderfully researched and vividly written testament to the tragedy, suffering, and science that have given rise to our still-limited understanding of these ferocious storms."

"[A Furious Sky is] ultra readable maritime history."

"[Dolin] blends lovely writing with clear explanations of technical concepts . . . With active language and sharp characters, he puts us in scene . . . Thanks to Dolin’s reporting and framing, each hurricane is a different story that delivers its own lesson about human nature."

"This is a compelling fact-and anecdote-filled story of the most dramatic storms to have stunned and sometimes fractured America’s coastal communities. But it is also a riveting foretelling of our future as the most destructive hurricanes in the past five centuries become commonplace. A Furious Sky joins that short list of books that are both must-reads and armchair page-turners."

"[T]his compelling book is much more than a meteorological history, it is a remarkably human story of people struggling with nature at its fiercest and the myriad ways hurricanes have affected the course of human events. . . . Many of [these] true tales of survival and loss will tug at the readers’ heartstrings as Dolin makes them vivid and memorable."

"A riveting mix of natural science, institutional history and human experience. All in a great read."

"[A] thoroughly engrossing book."

05/01/2020

Dolin (Leviathan) continues his series of popular histories with nautical or coastal themes with this exploration of hurricanes in the United States, deftly weaving together tales of tragedy, heroism, and scientific progress from colonial times until the present. Focusing on major storms and their impacts on the history of the United States, he draws from contemporaneous accounts to evoke the drama and power of these destructive storms. Meteorological advancements in our understanding of how hurricane storm systems form, grow, and travel as well as improvements in tracking and predictions have resulted in lower fatality rates, but growing population centers along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts have also meant increases in economic devastation. Many of the historic storms have entire books dedicated to them, but Emanuel's High Winds is the only similar comprehensive recent work on this topic, though its approach to the meteorological aspects is much more equation- and graph-heavy. A final chapter discusses the possible ramifications of global warming on hurricane formation, intensity, and impact. VERDICT Weather watchers, science buffs, and social historians will enjoy this history of the hurricane both as a chronology and for the individual tales of surviving nature's fury.—Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

★ 2020-03-15
How hurricanes have indelibly shaped America's land and society.

Drawing on abundant sources, including material from the National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, and Hurricane Research Division, and with an academic background in environmental policy, Dolin, who has a doctorate in environmental policy, offers an authoritative and lively history of hurricanes, beginning with 15th-century storms and ending with major hurricanes of 2017 and a brief account of Hurricane Dorian of last year. Besides chronicling the tense period leading up to landfall, the violent impact, the immediate responses, and the long-term recoveries, the author offers a fascinating history of weather forecasting, which was revolutionized by the telegraph in the mid-19th century. The Smithsonian Institution became the first repository of meteorological information when telegraph operators were instructed to send a message each morning describing the weather: cloudy, fair, or rainy. Soon, they added readings from meteorological instruments, making their forecasts more useful. In 1870, the U.S. Army Signal Corps took over weather forecasting, creating maps that could “predict the progression of weather over time.” But accuracy eluded forecasters until airplanes, satellites, radar, and computers came into play—and even then, controversy sometimes erupted about the intensity and course of a storm. Dolin traces many major events: “a storm surge of biblical proportions” in Galveston, Texas, in 1900; the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926; the Labor Day Hurricane that swept through the Florida Keys in 1935; the “sudden, jarring, widespread, and devastating” Great Hurricane of 1938; Hurricane Andrew in 1992, Katrina in 2005, and Sandy, which besieged New York City in 2012. Efforts to control hurricanes, such as seeding clouds with dry ice or silver iodide, failed. Other proposals, such as towing icebergs from the Arctic to cool the ocean and diminish a storm’s energy, were “outlandish and totally impractical.” Dolin underscores the threat of global warming to worsen hurricanes and urges society to act quickly and boldly “to counter this threat in any way we can.”

A sweeping, absorbing history of nature's power. (118 illustrations)