The winds were mild; the skies were clear. On Friday, September 7th, 1900, most of the thirty seven thousand residents of Galveston were looking forward to a quiet weekend. Within two days, however, more than a fifth of them would be dead, and their city of splendid homes & broad clean streets, their city of oleanders and roses and palms would be swept away or reduced to rubble. In hardcover, Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm brought the devastating Galveston hurricane of 1900 to present consciousness. This paperback edition will honor the centennial of this tragic event, the greatest disaster in American history.

Disastrous Predictions

Isaac Cline, one of the government's first professional weathermen, predicted with confidence that hurricanes posed little threat to the town of Galveston, Texas.

He discovered how wrong he was on September 8, 1900, when the bodies of dead children started floating into the train station. By the end of the day, the deadliest natural disaster in American history had claimed the lives of at least 8,000 people and destroyed thousands of homes in the bustling seaside town.

Isaac's Storm, drawing on eyewitness accounts, meteorological research, and Cline's own reports, weaves a tale of that fateful hurricane and the families it touched. When the ocean swells descended on the island, children were ripped out of windows, restaurants collapsed with diners inside, and Cline himself narrowly survived by climbing aboard floating wreckage and drifting out to sea.

The residents of Galveston received virtually no warning from the country's newly created weather service, which failed to recognize the storm's severity. When the rains started, children danced in the puddles, built rafts, and teased pets into jumping off porches into water. Several hours later, they were swept away when the ocean came over the wharf and engulfed the buildings.

At the turn of the century, the nation was bolstered by advances in engineering and science and swollen with "technological confidence." There was speculation that man could control the weather with cannon blasts and forest fires. So how did the hurricane manage to elude the crackerjack team of men in the country's first weather bureau?

Isaac's Storm details the bureau's formation and its historic context. Critics of the U.S. Signal Corps, the agency in charge, were widespread at the time. Some argued that it was not the place of man to study the weather, which was God's province. Others, including Mark Twain, simply pointed out that they weren't very good at it.

The storm, which started forming over Africa, passed over the Atlantic, gathering force as it approached Cuba. Weathermen there recognized its deadly potential, but their American counterparts were reluctant to be criticized for causing a panic. They also failed to notice when it took an odd left turn and started heading toward the Gulf of Mexico rather than the Atlantic states, where it was predicted to hit.

With harrowing detail, Isaac's Storm describes the events of that day and the fateful errors in judgment that led up to it. Blending meteorological science with history, it also offers an insightful look at American attitudes toward nature.

"They collected readings of temperature, pressure, and wind and based solely on those determined whether a storm existed or not.... Cuban meteorologists had the same instruments as their American counterparts, and took the same measurements, but read into them vastly greater potential for evil. The Cubans wrote of hunches and beliefs, sunsets and foreboding. Where the Americans saw numbers, the Cubans saw poetry," writes author Erik Larson.

Isaac Cline watched the falling barometer in Galveston, but nothing in the daily dispatches suggested the storm was headed in his direction. His brother Joseph, also employed by the weather bureau, watched the ocean's ominous signs and begged to differ. But for a few sea captains caught in the storm far offshore, nobody knew it had turned into a monster until it raked Galveston, precariously built on a narrow island spit.

When the storm subsided, thousands of bodies were loaded on barges and taken out to sea. The death toll stands higher than that from any other hurricane or natural disaster in American history, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. By detailing the events, errors, and consequences of that historic day, Isaac's Storm serves as a reminder that the forces of nature can defy logic and astound scientists in any era.

—Jennifer Langston

If the predictions of meteorologists are on target, this could be the most timely book of the next two months: This year's Atlantic hurricane season is supposed to produce more, and perhaps more intense, storms than in any recent year.

But if a major hurricane does menace the New England coast, Isaac's Storm will not be the most comfortable book to have by the bedside as the wind shrieks and the waves rise.

The storm in question - its designation as Isaac's is another question - is the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900. It was a storm of truly frightful proportions, turning a thriving, bustling city into a wasteland of rubble in which were buried the bodies of as many as 8,000 of its residents.

Erik Larson's accomplishment is to have made this great-storm story a very human one - thanks to his use of the large number of survivors' accounts - without ignoring the hurricane itself.

The storm crossed Cuba on Sept. 4 and was predicted to turn north toward the Atlantic coast. Instead, it steered across the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall just south of Galveston. The conventional wisdom of the time held that Galveston's sloping offshore shelf would temper the force of storm-driven waves, and there are accounts of children playing in the surf just hours before the hurricane-force winds drove the sea over the beach and far into the city.

By early evening, Larson writes, ''the sea had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long'' that was ''so tall, so massive that it acted as a kind of seawall'' - except that as the waves shoved it forward, ''it scraped the city clean of all structures and all life.''

This is clearly more than ''Isaac's storm.'' Building the story around one character is a useful device, but perhaps it was done mainly as an (over-)reaction to the impersonality of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm.'' True, Isaac Cline is an easily identifiable character, and there is a serious question about whether, as head of the weather bureau, he fatally underestimated the potential for destruction from a storm hitting Galveston. But curiously, the story seems to stall whenever Cline becomes the focus - and too often Larson has to pump up his central character with ''what was Isaac thinking'' speculation. And frankly, Larson's bit players too often upstage Cline.

Among the incidents that capture the physical and emotional impact of the storm surge is that experienced by merchant (and amateur meteorologist) Samuel O. Young. His house was six blocks in from the beachfront, and his family was safely out of town, so Young stayed, watching the storm's progress from his second-floor windows. Curious about ''a heavy thumping that seemed to come from a downstairs bedroom,'' he went to investigate. Looking down the stairwell, he saw that the water had risen almost to the top step. ''The heavy thudding ... had to be furniture. A bureau, perhaps, bumping against the ceiling as the water rose and fell.''

By that time, in the early evening, only one other house still stood in Young's immediate neighborhood: that of a family named Youens. As Young watched, he saw it ''begin a slow pirouette.'' In his account, ''Mr. Youens' house rose like a huge steamboat, was swept back and suddenly disappeared.'' Knowing that the parents and their two children had remained inside, he said, ''my feelings were indescribable as I saw them go.''

And there are dozens of other vividly recounted incidents that could be singled out to illustrate the dimensions of the story and Larson's skillful telling of it.

It is a tribute to his control of his material - and of his writing - that there is only one moment at which he seems to have allowed his emotional response to overtake the story.

''Suddenly,'' Larson writes, ''the prospect of watching their children die became very real'' for families trapped in their houses. ''Whom did you save? Did you seek to save one child, or try to save all, at the risk of ultimately saving none? ... And if you saved none, what then? How did you go on?''

The sophisticated reader may find the emotionalism unsettling, a lapse in literary judgment. But ultimately, as the accounts of just such situations multiply thumping like Mr. Young's furniture at the reader's consciousness - that series of questions universalizes the account of one storm in one place at one time. The storm, the place, the time, after all, could be here and now.
— Boston Globe

In a crucial scene in Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson's bestselling history of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, meteorologist Joseph Cline warns some residents that they should evacuate before a storm hits their town. But another meteorologist -- his older brother, Isaac -- insists they should stay. The debate takes place on Sept. 8, 1900 -- shortly before the hurricane slams into the thriving Texas town and kills thousands of people in a cataclysm that remains the most fatality-heavy natural disaster in U.S. history.

Isaac's Storm takes place in an era when the field of meteorology was just getting off the ground. While weather-watchers like Isaac and Joseph Cline had a strong faith in their scientific abilities, they obviously didn't have the technology that could have blessed their forecasts with more accuracy.

Despite his failings as a scientist, it is Isaac rather than his brother who has gone down in Galveston-area legend as the Paul Revere who warned residents to leave before the hurricane raged into town. Nearly two weeks after the storm, the New York Evening Sun noted that "the warnings which were sent out by Dr. [Isaac] Cline are said to have saved thousands of lives along the coast."

But in the new book's account, Isaac is an incompetent rather than a soothsayer, misreading the fatal portents in the atmosphere. Now Larson, a Time magazine contributor who started researching his book five years ago, has run into some local resistance to his revisionist take.

Meteorologist Lew Fincher, vice president of the Houston chapter of the American Meteorological Society, thinks Larson has made Isaac a scapegoat. Fincher defends Isaac's role in the hurricane: "I think he studied everything he could. He was going by the knowledge that they had with them in the bureau."

According to Isaac's Storm, the two brothers barely spoke after the storm; by the time they both died -- within a week of each other in 1955 -- they hadn't been in touch "for years." But Fincher says that he has read both brothers' journals and that Larson overdramatized their relationship: "I think that he was trying to come up with a personal conflict to make the book more human. I've read a lot on both of those guys, and there's nothing out of the ordinary that any brothers wouldn't have experienced."

According to Fincher, Larson neglected to read an account in a book that was published shortly after the storm, The Story of the Galveston Flood, in which the brothers are quoted speaking of each other quite warmly. The cold, stilted tone of their letters he shrugs off as a combination of their very formal Victorian higher education and their military background. On a scientific note, he takes exception to Larson's classification of the hurricane as a Category 5 storm: "I'd call it a 4, maybe a 3." (Nevertheless, he considers Larson's book "a great read.")

Larson, however, is adamant in his insistence that his reporting is dead on. "There's pretty good evidence that the legend is not completely accurate," he said on the phone from his Seattle home. "Most likely [Isaac] did go to the beach and warn some people -- but did he warn 6,000? I don't see how that is possible." Alluding to documents he found at the National Archives, he said that two accounts point to Isaac's telling some people to stay in Galveston.

As for the strain in the brothers' relationship, Larson says that he assumed it was common knowledge and insists that he had no authorial motive to bend the truth: "It would have been an equally good story if they hadn't have been rivals, but you've got to call them as you see them." Larson says that one formidable expert, Neil Frank (whom Fincher calls "the Babe Ruth of hurricanes"), mentioned the rivalry to him. When pressed for the source of his information about the epic silence between the brothers, he referred to Frank and to an article in the Southwest Quarterly. (Neither is cited in the book as a source for the information.) Larson maintains that he, like Fincher, read the journals of both men very closely and that the tension is unmistakable. According to Larson, although Joseph endured the storm with his brother, his lengthy account of it never mentions Isaac. "It's either funny or very tragic," Larson says.

As far as his classification of the storm, Larson concedes the controversy but stands by his reasoning. "Officially it was a 4," he says. "Having spent two and a half years of intense research on this storm, I'm convinced it was a 5. The bottom line is that no one can know for sure." (After all, nobody back then had Air Force planes to monitor oncoming storms.) Larson also says that he gave the manuscript to Hugh E. Willoughby, a leader in the field of hurricane research, and Willoughby had no problem with the classification. ("Any lingering errors are entirely my fault, not his," Larson's acknowledgment notes, using the standard formula.)

The meteorological journal Weatherwise cited a host of what it deemed factual errors in Isaac's Storm, which didn't prevent it from giving the book a rave review. Putting it in a class with Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air -- hugely popular books that have also been called into question for their accuracy -- Weatherwise calls Larson's narrative "reading at its best."
— Salon

...richly imagined and prodigiously researched...A gripping account, horridly fascinating to its core, and all the more compelling for being true...Few historical reconstructions sustain such drama.
— NY Times Book Review

Larson based the book on Cline's well-documented and sometimes personal reports of the storm as well as testimony from people who survived the hurricane....[A] classic tale of mankind versus nature — which once again describes the capricious and sometimes deadly nature of weather.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Torqued by drama and taut with suspense, this absorbing narrative of the 1900 hurricane that inundated Galveston, Tex., conveys the sudden, cruel power of the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Told largely from the perspective of Isaac Cline, the senior U.S. Weather Bureau official in Galveston at the time, the story considers an era when "the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself." As barometers plummet and wind gauges are plucked from their moorings, Larson (Lethal Passage) cuts cinematically from the eerie "eyewall" of the hurricane to the mundane hubbub of a lunchroom moments before it capitulates to the arriving winds, from the neat pirouette of Cline's house amid rising waters to the bridge of the steamship Pensacola, tossed like flotsam on the roiling seas. Most intriguingly, Larson details the mistakes that led bureau officials to dismiss warnings about the storm, which killed over 6000 and destroyed a third of the island city. The government's weather forecasting arm registered not only temperature and humidity but also political climate, civic boosterism and even sibling rivalries. America's patronizing stance toward Cuba, for instance, shut down forecasts from Cuban meteorologists, who had accurately predicted the Galveston storm's course and true scale, even as U.S. weather officials issued mollifying bulletins calling for mere rain and high winds. Larson expertly captures the power of the storm itself and the ironic, often catastrophic consequences of the unpredictable intersection of natural force and human choice. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

One hundred years ago, come September, a hurricane ripped through Galveston, TX, submerging most of the low-lying city, killing unknown thousands of its residents, and forever changing its economic destiny. The sheer magnitude of the disaster practically guarantees that any book about it will be fascinating, but Larson goes further, weaving in the story of government meteorologist Isaac Cline, who lost his wife and home in the storm and barely survived himself. Cline was afterward seen as a hero, but he had actually dismissed his brother's warnings about the storm and done nothing to prepare Galveston for its coming. Isaac's Storm is a compelling story of nature's overwhelming power and of government blunders. This abridgment makes it a good length for listening, and actor Edward Herrmann's well-modulated reading moves its complex story along nicely. Recommended for general collections.--R. Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

YA-Larson has brought together powerful elements to create one of the most memorable of the "natural disaster" docudramas that have come out recently. Meteorologists within the U.S. Weather Bureau at the turn of the 20th century had become so confident of their own forecasting abilities that they dismissed with irritation troubling weather reports out of Cuba. In a burgeoning port city like Galveston, TX, in 1900, the idea that severe damage could be done by a hurricane seemed preposterous. Following several threads at once, Larson creates a likable character in the real-life weatherman Isaac Cline, tracing his career as a meteorologist. A tropical depression takes on an ominous life of its own as it thrashes its way through the Caribbean and up through the Gulf of Mexico. The town of Galveston becomes one of the major characters in the story. Poignant details and sweeping narrative create a book that is hard to put down even though the outcome is a well-known historical fact: more than 6000 dead and an entire city devastated. At the same time, Larson chronicles a critical period of history for the National Weather Bureau. The blatant errors in judgment led to changes within that federal agency. More than anything, this is a gripping and heartbreaking story of what happens when arrogance meets the immutable forces of nature.-Cynthia J. Rieben, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

The best natural disaster book of the decade.

[Larson has] made this great storm story a very human one-thanks to his use of the large number of survivors' accounts-without ignoring the hurricane itself.

Brilliant…Keeps the reader spellbound.

The Jaws of hurricane yarns.

There is bad weather, and there are 100-year storms. Then there are meteorological events. In September 1900, one of the latter visited Galveston, Tex., and ate the city alive. Larson tells the story with (at times overnourished) brio. The Isaac in Larson's (Lethal Passage: How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis, 1994) title is Isaac Cline: head meteorologist of the Galveston station of the US Weather Bureau in 1900, a man who thought he had the drop on weather systems because he had data, and from data he could predict the meteorological future. But, as Larson shows, from Philo of Byzantium in 300 b.c. to the talking weatherheads of today, forecasting the weather has always been a "black and dangerous art." When Cline blithely stated that Galveston's vulnerability to extreme weather was "an absurd delusion," he was inviting trouble, and it came calling. A series of administrative snafus and ignored warnings from Cuba found the city unprepared for the monster rogue hurricane. The air turned wild and gray, a storm surge swept over the city, the wind became "a thousands little devils, shrieking and whistling," said a survivor. It is now thought to have topped 150 mph. "Slate fractured skulls and removed limbs. Venomous snakes spiraled upward into trees occupied by people. A rocket of timber killed a horse in mid-gallop." It's estimated that 8,000 people died, and Cline was not decorated for his brilliant forecasting by a grateful city government. Larson paints a withering portrait of the early Weather Bureau and offers a wild and woolly reconstruction of the storm, full of gripping anecdotal accounts told with flair, even if heoverplays the portents, sapping their menace and turning them into a melodrama most often accompanied by trembling piano keys. Cline saw himself as "a scientist, not some farmer who gauged the weather by aches in his rheumatoid knee." He should have listened to his bones. Larson captures his ignominy, and the storm in its fury.

A gripping account ... fascinating to its core, and all the more compelling for being true.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Gripping ... the Jaws of hurricane yarns.” —The Washington Post

"The best storm book I've read, consumed mostly in twenty-four hours; these pages filled me with dread. Days later, I am still glancing out the window nervously. A well-told story." —Daniel Hays, author of My Old Man and the Sea

"Isaac's Storm so fully swept me away into another place, another time that I didn't want it to end. I braced myself from the monstrous winds, recoiled in shock at the sight of flailing children floating by, and shook my head at the hubris of our scientists who were so convinced that they had the weather all figured out. Erik Larson's writing is luminous, the story absolutely gripping. If there is one book to read as we enter a new millennium, it's Isaac's Storm, a tale that reminds us that there are forces at work out there well beyond our control, and maybe even well beyond our understanding." —Alex Kotlowitz, author of The Other Side of the River and There Are No Children Here

"There is electricity in these pages, from the crackling wit and intelligence of the prose to the thrillingly described terrors of natural mayhem and unprecedented destruction. Though brimming with the subtleties of human nature, the nuances of history, and the poetry of landscapes, Isaac's Storm still might best be described as a sheer page turner." —Melissa Faye Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing

"Superb…. Larson has made [Isaac] Cline, turn-of-the-century Galveston, and the Great Hurricane live again." —The Wall Street Journal

"Erik Laron's accomplishment is to have made this great-storm story a very human one —thanks to his use of the large number of survivors' accounts—without ignoring the hurricane itself." —The Boston Globe

"Vividly captures the devastation." —Newsday

"This brilliant exploration of the hurrican's deadly force...tracks the gathering storm as if it were a character…. Larson has the storyteller's gift of keeping the reader spellbound." —The Times-Picayune

"With consumate narrative skill and insight into turn-of-the-century American culture…. Larson's story is about the folly of all who believe that man can master or outwit the forces of nature." —The News & Observer

"A powerful story ... a classic tale of mankind versus nature." —The Christian Science Monitor

One hundred years ago this September, a hurricane blew Galveston, Texas, apart, drowning at least 6000 citizens. U.S. Weather Bureau Station Chief Isaac Cline believed that the city was not in the natural path of storms of deadly strength. Larson's account vividly reconstructs the sights, sounds, and smells of turn-of-the-century Galveston from contemporary letters, diaries, journals, telegrams, photographs, and victim lists to examine the tragic consequences of Cline's misjudgment. Richard Davidson resists presenting the pre-storm context in a naïve tone, but reads throughout with appropriate expressions of imminent danger and, later, of catastrophe. Davidson's sense of measured concern helps pace the listener through some eccentric detail to bring out Larson's thoroughly researched account. A bonus cassette contains an upbeat and informative interview with the author, who discusses, among other things, his technique for turning plausible inferences from primary sources into a unique brand of journalistic history. V.B. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine