An enthralling profile of a storm enthusiast and adrenaline junkie who took his intense interest to extreme measures.
An adroit biography of a thrill-seeking storm chaser.
Dubbing tornadoes “the only real dragons the modern world has left,” journalist Hargrove, a weather fanatic himself, chronicles the life of the intrepid Tim Samaras. The author charts Samaras’ fascination with twisters back to an inquisitive childhood, when he was transfixed by the tempest in The Wizard of Oz and the raw power of severe weather systems in his native Colorado. From youthful tinkering to an early gig at the Denver Research Institute to becoming a prominent self-made engineer, Samaras also got married and had a son (whom he dressed as a foam tornado for Halloween). He dove head-first into his obsession after accessing real-time weather technology and meteorological gadgetry, which, as it advanced in sophistication over the decades, only served to heighten his insatiable curiosity and boundless enthusiasm to stand “inside the lungs of a storm.” An autodidact, he amassed knowledge and an impressive skill set through his experiences working for and in conjunction with a variety of tornado scientists and enthusiasts. Samaras constructed his own weather instruments and logged countless hours locked in the paths of tornadoes across the Midwest, the Southeast, and beyond. Hargrove refreshingly contributes quality information on what intrigues and motivates storm chasers, their unique camaraderie, and the evolution of the sophisticated tracking equipment in use today. The author, who never met Samaras, builds his biography through recordings, interviews, research, extensive video footage, and connections with his family, friends, colleagues, and “chase buddies.” Despite repeated warnings by peers that his increasingly perilous chases were venturing toward the suicidal, Samaras remained addicted to “the euphoric rush of pulling up just in time to see the cloud wisps gather and descend.” Samaras perished after being swept up in a tornado in Oklahoma in 2013, but Hargrove’s debut biography honors his legacy as an unparalleled storm chaser.
An enthralling profile of a storm enthusiast and adrenaline junkie who took his intense interest to extreme measures.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9609-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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