Storm chasers will find thrills in this tale of nature’s wrath.
Tracking a furious, lethal storm.
In her debut nonfiction book, Yahoo News correspondent Bailey, a former White House correspondent for Newsweek, gives a tense recounting of the devastating tornado that struck her hometown of Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20, 2013. Central Oklahoma is called “tornado alley” because of the frequency and severity of twisters that tear through the region, but after five tornadoes struck Moore in 15 years, that town earned an epithet as “the tornado alley of tornado alley.” As in many disaster books, we first meet the major players: Gary England, a trusted TV weather forecaster aiming to tamp down sensationalism; his feisty rival Mike Morgan; their young counterpart, Damon Lane, newly hired at another station; a National Weather Service forecaster; the principal of an elementary school directly in the twister’s path; Moore’s city manager; and many others. Nail-biting chronology drives the plot, which lags a bit when characters’ worries repeat in chapter after chapter. Tornadoes are mysterious weather phenomena, Bailey learned, that only recently have become somewhat predictable. In Oklahoma, the base ingredients—a collision of warm and cool fronts—are particularly volatile: “Intensely moist air from the Gulf of Mexico will often collide with cool, dry air wafting down from Canada over the Rockies, and the two forces are further churned together by the jet stream.” When temperatures or moisture levels vary significantly, a supercell may—or may not—form, generating a tornado. A mile wide, with winds over 200 miles per hour, the May 20 tornado began “as nothing more than a wispy little funnel, dancing shyly between the clouds and the ground”; within minutes, it “morphed into a hulking beast devouring everything in its path”: houses, trucks, electrical wires, even grass. Though occasionally overheated, Bailey’s prose vividly evokes the tornado’s power and menace.
Storm chasers will find thrills in this tale of nature’s wrath.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42749-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
